IN A LAB at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio’s Centro District, Dr. Lucas Castro tried to steady his trembling hands as he waited impatiently for a machine to finish preparing a tissue sample for examination.
Please let me be wrong, Dr. Castro thought. Please.
There were two others in the lab, young technicians who were paying more attention to the television screen on the wall than to their work. Soccer analysts were discussing the next day’s game and still shaking their heads over the thrashing Brazil had taken in the semifinal against Germany.
Seven to one? Castro thought. After everything done to bring the World Cup to Brazil, after everything done to me, we go down by six goals?
The doctor forgot about the tissue sample for a moment, felt himself seized by growing anger yet again.
It’s a national embarrassment, he thought. The World Cup never should have happened. But, no, FIFA, those corrupt sons of—
The timer beeped. Castro pulled himself out of the thoughts that had circled in his brain ever since the crushing loss four days before.
The doctor opened the machine. He scratched his beard, a habit when he was anxious. He retrieved and cooled a small block of sterile medium that now encased a sample of liver tissue he’d helped extract from a very sick eight-year-old girl named Maria. She and her six-year-old brother had been brought to the institute’s clinic violently ill in a way Castro had rarely seen before: sweating, shaking, decreased function in almost every major organ.
The doctor took the block to another machine that shaved razor-thin slices off it. He stained these, mounted them on slides, and took them to a microscope. Castro was a virologist as well as an MD. In any other situation, he would have run a time-consuming test to determine whether a virus was involved, but if his suspicions were right, looking at the cells themselves would be a much quicker indicator.
He put the first slide under the lens.
Please let me be wrong about this.
Castro peered into the microscope, adjusted it, and saw his fears confirmed in several devastating seconds. Many of the cells had been attacked, invaded, and hideously transformed.
They looked like bizarre, alien reptiles with translucent coiled-snake bodies and multiple heads. Seeing them, Dr. Castro flashed on a primitive jungle village exploding in flames and felt rattled to his core.
How many heads? he thought in a panic. How many?
Castro zoomed in on one of the infected cells and counted five. Then he looked at another and found six.
Six?
Not five? Not four?
He looked and quickly found another six-headed cell, and another.
Oh dear God, this can’t be—
A nurse burst into the lab, cried, “The girl’s crashing, Doctor!”
Castro spun away from the microscope and bolted after her.
“Who’s with her?” he demanded as they raced down a hallway and through a door that led them outside onto a medical campus.
“Dr. DeSales,” she said, gasping.
Castro blew by her and sprinted down the street to the institute’s hospital.
He reached the door of the ICU two minutes later. A man and a woman in their thirties stopped him before he could go in.
“No one will tell us anything, Doctor!” the woman sobbed.
“We’re doing our best,” Castro told the girl’s parents, and he dodged into the ICU, where he yelled at the nurses, “Get us hazmat suits. Quarantine the room. Then quarantine the entire unit!”
Castro grabbed a surgical mask, went to the doorway, saw Dr. DeSales working furiously on a comatose eight-year-old girl. “John, get out of there.”
“If I do, she dies,” Dr. DeSales said.
“You don’t, you could die.”
Various alarms started sounding from the monitors and machines attached to a six-year-old boy in the bed next to the girl. Dr. Castro scanned the numbers, saw the boy was crashing too.
Throwing aside all caution, Castro yanked on sterile gloves and went to work, frantically adding a series of medicines to the IV.
“What the hell is it?” DeSales demanded.
“A virus I’ve seen only once before,” Castro said. “We called it Hydra. Goes after the major organs.”
“Transmission?”
“Not certain, but we think body fluids.”
“Mortality rate?”
“Roughly sixteen percent the last time it appeared,” Castro said. “But I think there have been mutations that made it deadlier. C’mon, Jorge, fight.”
But the boy continued to fail. The doctors tried everything that had helped in these cases before, but no matter what they did, Jorge and his sister kept slipping further from their control. Their kidneys shut down. Then their livers.
Eleven minutes after Castro entered the ICU, blood began to seep from the little girl’s eyes. Then Maria was racked by a series of violent convulsions that culminated in a massive heart attack.
She died.
Fourteen minutes later, in the same terrible way, little Jorge did too.