Minutes to Burn

A short woman-five foot two in sneakers-Samantha had the slightly frazzled air of a mother of three. Having neglected the wash for the past month and a half, she'd shown up to work wearing her daugh-ter's T-shirt featuring the five smiling faces of NVME's members. Fortu-nately, she also fit into her six-year-old son's shoes-green Velcro Adidas with asphalt marks on the white rubber outsoles-as she'd run from the house barefoot that morning only to realize it when she'd pulled up to base. She'd found the Adidas in the back of the minivan, buried in a mound of camping equipment from a trip into the Catoctins that, having been planned for two months and canceled three times, had almost come to fruition the prior weekend, only to be interrupted by the emergency at hand. A pair of wire-frame John Lennon-style glasses perched on her nose, the thin metal arms disappearing back into her curly brown hair.

Having little use for a husband, she'd adopted all three of her children over the past nine years. Earlier in her career, she couldn't have even considered being a mother. She'd been dispatched for months at a time on various projects-bleeding horses in rural Costa Rica for Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chasing Machupo virus up the eastern slope of the Andes, trekking through mosquito breeding grounds in the Nile Delta. But after her stint at CDC in Atlanta, she was given an offer to run DAD at USAMRIID, and she'd vowed to attempt some form of a domestic life. Being a mother, she'd found, had toughened her considerably more than being a major and running a division of testosterone-poisoned, military-sanctioned control freaks. But she liked Fort Detrick nonethe-less, and the seasons in central Maryland.

The stark modern USAMRIID building looked as if it had been dropped into the middle of the base from orbit, so out of place did it look among the conservative, faded-brick buildings. Inside, the sleek, tiled floors and fluorescent lights countered the battleship-gray walls. All work with infectious agents was undertaken in one section, divided into four units, each of which was in turn split into four "hot suites." Each hot suite employed a constellation of blowers, vents, and pressure sys-tems to ensure that airborne pathogens could not leak from the area. The filters killed any atomized biohazard before laboratory air was released to the outside. Everywhere in the building, the airflow was directed inward.

It was precisely this inflow of white noise that Samantha sought to combat with her singing. "The itsy bitsy spider…" Her voice, soft and high like a child's, activated the small microphone that allowed her to communicate with her lab technician, who wore a space suit similar to her own. "… contracted a new strain of aerosol-infectious Bolivian hemor-rhagic fever…" She leaned forward over the cadaver. She'd already made a Y-shaped incision to open the chest and abdomen. Her arm throbbed slightly from the latest battery of inoculations; because of all the shots she received in her line of work, her deltoids were usually sore.

She gestured with her scalpel at the lab tech. "Retract the small bowel so I can get at the root of the mesentery." The abdominal cavity was always difficult because it was so full; with all the coils of bowel, there was less room for maneuvering. She reached down and poked at the fattened stomach, knowing from experience it would be filled with clotted, foul-smelling liquid. Unfortunately, the respirators did not screen out odors.

"Down came the virologist, and washed the virus out," she sang.

The lab tech leaned forward and secured the squishy bowel in his gloved, slightly unsteady hands. "Don't cut me," he said.

"Oh really?" Samantha replied. "Well, there go my plans for the week. I was hoping to watch the effects of the disease take hold in one of my colleagues."

Starting at the mesentery, she cut away excess tissue and muscle attachments so that she could pull out the organs. The procedure was crassly referred to as "the pluck." One "plucked" out first the thoracic organs, then the abdominal organs.

"Hemorrhaging around the gums, yellow sclera, bloody stool, ecchy-moses, petechial hemorrhages, blood in the urine… " Samantha grasped the enlarged heart, pulling gently, and began singing again. "Out came the sun and dried up all the rain…"

The tech nervously regarded the nearby formalin, ready to plunge his hand into the sterilizing agent at the slightest nick. But Samantha's hands were completely steady. She trimmed neatly around her assistant's fin-gers, humming the next bar from the children's song as she sliced through tissue. She stopped suddenly. "Aha! Look at this."

The pleural cavity was filled with fluid, and the lungs were scattered with hard patches of red. She took a sample, placing it in a small vial and screwing the lid on tightly before scrubbing the outside with a disinfectant.