African Swine Fever was first found in China—the world’s largest pork producer—last August, and it quickly spread to every province in the country. Official numbers show 1.1 million pigs have been culled there, but experts believe the real number may have reached 200 million, or more than a third of the country’s herd. It hopped the border into Vietnam in February, where it has since led to the death or culling of 2.8 million pigs—10 percent of the country’s herd—prompting calls for a nationwide state of emergency. In recent months, cases have cropped up in Laos, Cambodia, Mongolia, and North Korea.

Despite clear urgency, the rollout of a viable vaccine will take years. In the meantime, the United States Department of Agriculture is rushing to formulate a plan to keep ASF from wreaking havoc on the U.S. pork supply. And that means teaching veterinarians all over the country how to identify pigs with the disease. Earlier this summer, roughly 30 or so gathered on Plum Island to train for the task. They were prepping for a pork-pocalypse, and it started with a necropsy.

Between Connecticut and Long Island lies a three-mile-long island, shaped a little like a pork chop. It’s home to all kinds of government projects that have nothing to do with foreign animal diseases: The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) runs a simulation exercise to restart a hacked power grid every six months or so. New York National Guard soldiers used the island last spring to practice containing a simulated release of nerve gas. Search-and-rescue teams fly in from all over the country to practice extracting people from the ruins of a decaying military fort, which simulates a disaster zone. A futuristic-looking seismographic dome can detect nuclear activity ten thousand miles away. It’s kind of like a playground for end times.

But the main activity revolves around the Animal Disease Center, a storied laboratory that was opened in the 1950s by the United States Department of Agriculture. Like any good secluded government project, it has long been plagued by rumors that its researchers, say, experiment with bioweapons, breed mutant dogs, even tinker with the actual plague. Given how opaque the research center can be, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the rumors are rooted in truth.