The Demon in the Freezer

Preston’s title calls attention to the world’s two official smallpox freezers—one at the CDC in Atlanta, the other in Russia—as one of the central sets of symbols in his book. However, what exactly the two freezers signify is not so easy to pin down. It is possible to take the freezers as tangible symbols of the success of smallpox eradication, a process that drove smallpox out of nature and into its twenty-first-century resting places, these two repositories. It is equally possible to understand the freezers as signs of looming danger since it was feared that the CDC would become a 9/11 terrorist target, or as indicators that the victory over smallpox remains incomplete. Smallpox officially resides in the freezers, but whether there are clandestine bioterror stores elsewhere remains an unresolved question.

Skull anthrax is by its very name a symbol of death or disaster, though there is a further significance to the “skulls” that characterize this anthrax as so ominous. Preston explains that such anthrax is “designed to fall apart in the air, to self-crumble, maybe when it encountered humidity or other conditions” (215). This is weapons-grade anthrax, produced using an “anthrax trick” supposedly known only to scientists like