The rabbit was still alive, and I fed him and set his cage on top of a counter neatly built of plywood and painted black. Beneath it was a refrigerator, and in it I found Vero and human embryonic lung fibroblast cells. They were tissue cultures routinely used for feeding poxviruses, just as fertilizers are used for certain plants. To maintain these cultures, the mad farmer of this mobile lab had a good supply of Eagle minimal essential medium, supplemented with ten percent fetal calf serum. This and the rabbit told me that deadoc was doing more than maintaining his virus, he was still in the process of propagating it when disaster had struck.

He had kept the virus in a liquid nitrogen freezer that did not need to be plugged in, but refilled every few months. It looked like a ten-gallon stainless steel thermos, and when I unscrewed the lid, I pulled out seven cryo-tubes so old that instead of plastic, they were made of glass. Codes that should have identified the disease were unlike anything I’d ever seen, but there was a date of 1978, and the location of Birmingham, England, tiny abbreviations written in black ink, neatly, and in lowercase. I returned the tubes of living, frozen horror to their frigid place, and rooted around more, finding twenty sample sizes of Vita facial spray, and tuberculin syringes that the killer, no doubt, had used to inoculate the canisters with the disease.

Of course, there were pipettes and rubber bulbs, petri dishes, and the flasks with screw caps where the virus was actually growing. The medium inside them was pink. Had it begun to turn pale yellow, the PH balance would indicate waste products, acidity, meaning the virus-laden cells had not been bathed in their nutrient-rich tissue culture medium in a while.

I remembered enough from medical school and my training as a pathologist to know that when propagating a virus, the cells must be fed. This is done with the pink culture medium, which must be aspirated off every few days with a pipette, when the nutrients have been replaced by waste. For the medium still to be pink meant this had been done recently, at least within the last four days. Deadoc was meticulous. He had cultivated death with love and care. Yet there were two flasks broken on the floor, perhaps due to an infected rabbit hopping about, somehow accidentally out of its cage. I did not sense suicide here, but an unforeseen catastrophe that had caused deadoc to run.

Slowly, I moved around some more, through the kitchen, where a single bowl and fork had been washed and neatly left to dry on a dish towel by the sink. Cupboards were orderly, too, with rows of simple spices, boxes of cereal and rice and cans of vegetable soup. In the refrigerator was skim milk, apple juice, onions and carrots, but no meat. I closed the door as my mystification grew. Who was he? What did he do in this camper day after day besides make his viral bombs? Did he watch TV? Did he read?