Free the Devil's Workshop (1999) by Stephen Cannell Page B

like a rabid animal.
    Dr. DeMille ran up the stairs and onto the death row tier. Video cameras had also been set up in the cellblock, to record both Sylvester and Troy Lee. Dexter had been watching a monitor in his room and had seen the attack. Sylvester Swift was standing at his cell door, unchanged, but looking worried.
    "Troy Lee, can you hear me?" Dexter asked the wild-looking murderer, who was in the center of his cell, blood and spit foaming at his mouth, his breath coming in gasps. "Tell me, tell me what you're feeling. What's it feel like? The rage you feel--is it uncontrollable?" He had a tape recorder out and pushed toward the bars.
    Troy Lee's mind was somewhere else; he was homicidally insane. He charged Dexter DeMille and smashed against the metal bars, grabbing for Dexter's hand holding the tape recorder. Blood from the deep cuts on his forehead splattered out into the corridor. The microbiologist had been ready, and jumped back, avoiding the lunge.
    "Get this soldier to sick bay," Dexter ordered.
    They took the M . P . with the bleeding hand away. For almost twenty minutes more, Troy Lee raged in his cell.
    It was worse than anything Dexter had ever seen among the Fore Aboriginal tribe in New Guinea in '73. They also had rages in the early stages of the disintegrating brain disease they called "Kuru," but it was nothing like this. He and Carleton Gajdusek had tried to save them, but one by one, the Aborigines first went mad, then died. It took the microbiologist a year of doing autopsies in grass huts to isolate and identify the likely cause as a rogue protein that was eating away the mood control center in their midbrains.
    After he returned from New Guinea, Dexter had not been able to find funding to continue his Prion research. While he was teaching microbiology at Sam Houston University he was approached one evening by the head of the department and offered a research sabbatical at Fort Detrick, Maryland. It was there that he met the frightening Admiral Zoll, who surprised him with a thorough knowledge of his work in New Guinea. He was introduced to Zoll's bio - weapons program at the Devil's Workshop. There he began experimenting with mixing Kuru and mad cow disease, a similar protein-based illness that had recently surfaced in English cattle, making them crazy by also attacking the mood center in their brains.
    The initial problem with his concoctions was that the total destruction of the midbrain took over two years--way too long for a bio-weapon. To accelerate the devastation, DeMille had finally mixed in a strain of human Epstein-Barr virus. E . B . virus proved a perfect accelerant. He continued to tinker and adjust, finding other ways to speed the result. His tests on primates were extensive, and finally he had a strain of Prion that ran its course in hours. He named his discovery the "Pale Horse Prion," PHpr, and it now had several unique characteristics that made it an excellent choice as a bio-weapon. One was stealth ... the Prion appeared to be just another "normal" protein. It was undetectable by ordinary lab tests, and it was impervious to sterilization. PHpr was a "Dr. Jekyll" protein that transformed into a vicious "Mr. Hyde" Prion when activated.
    He watched now in fascination as Troy Lee's hands clawed insanely at his own throat. His eyes were red-rimmed and resembled no eyes Dexter DeMille had ever seen.
    Then, as with Kuru and mad cow, the rages started to subside and Troy Lee began to lose his balance, each time falling on his right side. During the next hour came the onset of tremors and dementia.
    "The patient has gone into the severe ataxic stage," Dr. DeMille said into his tape recorder.
    Twenty minutes later, Troy Lee was on his back, gurgling fluids out of his mouth as occasional grand-mal seizures ravaged his trembling body.
    "It is four thirty-five," Dexter said softly into his tape recorder. "The subject now has badly impaired swallowing and has gone into status epilepticus."
    At