The Calm Before The Swarm (2 page)

"From what I've seen," Lauren said, "there
are no outward signs of contagion, viral or bacterial. It doesn't
look like there was even enough time for anything to pass between
them. That doesn't necessarily rule out an infectious agent,
though. If there's anything in the samples, we'll find it."

"Then that ought to make your job here
pretty easy."

He glanced over at her. His mask stretched
over a smile. There was obviously something he wasn't telling
her.

Cranston led her past the congregation of
suits, whose voices lowered when she neared, and to the center of
the ring. She recognized the massive bucket-shaped platforms the
elephants used to rise to their full height and the man with the
whip who encouraged them to do so. The tough, leathery hide had
protected the elephants from the worst of the assault, yet their
skin still bubbled with what looked like gray boils.

"We know the cause of death was the sheer
number of bee stings to the head and face," Cranston said. "We just
don't understand why they attacked like they did, why their stings
were so toxic, or where they came from."

One of the elephants was in much worse shape
than the others. A gaping wound framed its abdomen, fringed by
tatters of gray hide, viscera spilled out all over the ground. The
bowels were thoroughly destroyed, torn apart.

Lauren could only stare at the mess. This
was why she was here. Suddenly, she realized that she wouldn't be
going home anytime soon.

"I can tell you where they came from." She
pointed at the mess of entrails. "They chewed their way out of
their host. A better question would be...where are they now?"

"Bees living in an elephant's guts?"
Cranston scoffed. "I don't buy that for a second."

"The evidence is right here at your feet,"
Lauren said. She knelt over the viscera, removed a long pair of
blunt forceps from her case, and tugged at the frayed mesentery.
"Look at the edges. These aren't clean incisions, nor are they
ragged tears. You see how they almost appear serrated? That was
caused by mastication. Think about how many insects it must have
taken to kill this many people so quickly. There had to be hundreds
of thousands of them, maybe millions. They didn't just swarm in
here through the tent flaps. I may not be an expert on bees, but I
can't imagine them behaving like that. No. That many individuals?
They had to be brought here in some sort of vessel. And I think
that's exactly what we're looking at here."

"Your theory doesn't stand to reason. How in
the world do you propose someone was able to make a two-ton
pachyderm swallow millions of bees? How would they survive inside
of it?"

"That's my job to figure out." She glanced
up at Cranston. "Have you already photographed this elephant?"

"Yeah...why?"

Lauren removed a scalpel from her briefcase
and slit open a length of the small bowel like she was gutting a
snake. The inner mucosa was wrinkled and slimy, and dotted with
brownish chyme. She sifted through the sludge until she found what
she was looking for, pinched it with the forceps, and extricated it
from the ileum.

"What is it?" Cranston asked.

She held up the forceps so he could see the
small insect. It had curled in upon itself, the nub where its
stinger had been tucked over the top of its head. Its long, slender
wings iridesced with orange under the spotlight. Its body was jet
black with rings such a deep shade of crimson they were nearly
indistinguishable. A diminutive orange petiole articulated the tiny
thorax with an abdomen that hooked under like a scorpion's tail in
reverse. It had a triangular-shaped head with mandibles that looked
like those of an ant on a much grander scale.

This was no bee.

Its body was more reminiscent of that of a
wasp, sleek and dangerous, but wasps didn't lose their stingers
like bees, and bees were hairy to facilitate the collection of
pollen.

She slid the carcass into a collection bag
and passed it to Cranston, who held it close to his face to study
it.

"I don't get it," he said. "When a bee loses
its stinger, it dies shortly thereafter, right? This one lost its
stinger and died inside the elephant. So where are all of their
bodies? They should be everywhere."

Lauren rose and snatched the bag back from
him.

"They have to be somewhere around here. We
just haven't found them yet. While you're looking, I'm going to see
if I can figure out which species this might be, and how it ended
up in the digestive tract of this animal."

She had a hunch, but she wasn't ready to
share it. Not yet, anyway. Not until she knew for sure. And if she
was right....

"Hey!" one of the gowned men called from the
bleachers. He held a black rectangular object over his head. "Look
what I found! And it's still recording!"

He clambered over the bodies and descended
to the leveled dirt. Cranston hurried over to meet him. Lauren
followed. They were joined by the group of agents in short
measure.

Cranston took the camcorder from the
forensics tech and turned it over and over in his hands.

Lauren heard it softly whir as it continued
to record.

The Special Agent opened the three-inch
side-flap view screen, then looked back at the tech.

"See if you can find any more of these." He
pressed the
STOP
button and the red light
over the lens darkened. He turned to face the rest of them. "Are
you guys ready to do this?"

Cranston led them out of the big top and
into the wash of light where at least the breeze circulated the
stench. Lauren breathed a sigh of relief. She had begun to feel
increasingly uncomfortable under the blank stares of the dead that
packed the bleachers. Consciously, she knew they weren't actually
watching her, but that didn't alleviate the crawling sensation on
her skin. She didn't suppose the fact that they had all been killed
by some sort of wasp helped in that regard either.

The other agents closed rank around
Cranston, forcing Lauren to stand on her toes to see between
them.

Cranston rewound the recording to the start
and pressed
PLAY
.

The shaky footage began with a close-up of a
woman holding a toddler on her hip. The young boy bared a big grin
for the camera. Behind them, Lauren saw the ticket booth down the
hill through the grove of trees. They were standing at the edge of
the parking lot while scores of people who had no idea what fate
had in store for them funneled past.

The sound was a continuous low rumble
metered by the excited cries of children and the occasional feline
roar.

Cut to a jostling view of the inside of the
fairgrounds. The woman now held the child's hand as they weaved
through the crowd, passing games of chance stocked with stuffed
animals bigger than the young boy, various attractions with greasy
ticket collectors, and carts selling pretzels, snow cones, and
glowing necklaces. The woman held up the child's hand and helped
him wave to the camera.

Another cut and they were in a different
section of the grounds. This time, Lauren could only assume, the
woman held the camcorder while presumably the father piggybacked
the boy, who clung to the man's forehead as though his life
depended upon it. The man pointed off to his right and the lens
followed. A pen had been cordoned off in a broad section of dirt.
The sign on the fence promised camel rides for five dollars. A
grungy man with a scraggly beard guided the camel in a circle by
its reigns, much to the delight of the twin girls perched between
its fur-capped humps.

The camera swung again to the right and
zoomed in on another enclosure where several men raked hay into
piles for the elephant troupe. One of the pachyderms thrust its
trunk into the mound, gave it a twirl, and lifted a clump to its
mouth. Another man appeared with a hose and sprayed down the
smaller elephants in the rear. Flies buzzed around them, causing
the enormous animals to flap their ears. Heaps of dung led all the
way back to where a fourth elephant rested listlessly on its side.
Two more men, who had obviously fallen in the mud several times,
pushed and shoved at the behemoth in an effort to force it back to
its feet. It didn't even appear capable of standing.

Lauren had a pretty good hunch as to
why.

A small crowd had gathered off to the side
to watch, among them a couple of teenagers smoking and passing back
and forth a water bottle that made them wince with each swig of the
spiked concoction, an elderly man with an ornate cane that appeared
too short to be of any real use, and a visibly pregnant woman with
coffee-colored skin who wore her raven-black hair in a ponytail and
an expression of abject horror on her face.

Past the elephant's rear haunches, a man of
Middle Eastern descent stood stock-still, staring down at the
animal, his features devoid of emotion. He wore a faded ball cap
low over his hooded eyes and what looked like a cattle prod in a
sheath on one hip and a transceiver holstered on the other.

One of the men who had been trying to make
the sick elephant stand rushed up to him, gesticulating wildly with
his hands. The man with the ball cap glanced over at the
spectators, his gaze lingering on one of them for a long moment,
and then ushered the agitated handler toward an unmarked mobile
trailer.

The recording darkened. A sudden flash
forced the aperture to rectify its focus. The center ring was
spread out below, partially obscured by the heads of the people in
the row below the cameraman. The ringmaster stepped into the
spotlight, but the camera panned left and focused on the young
boy's face. He sat in his mother's lap, eyes bright, mouth open
wide in wonder.

Cut to clowns piling out of a miniature car.
Acrobats flipping and twirling from the high-wires. A lion tamer
goading his maned charge with a whip and a chair. A tiger leaping
through a ring of fire. A parade of elephants circling the
ring.

There was a high-pitched squeal that
degenerated into feedback.

The view snapped suddenly to the left. In
the foreground, the young boy pressed his small hands to the sides
of his head. Above his head, the camera focused on a bank of
speakers mounted to the tent supports, then whipped back toward the
ring, flashing past faces that had all turned toward the sound,
hands clapped over their ears.

One of the elephants wobbled and fell.
Several trainers raced to its side.

The field of view panned across the chaos.
Clowns and other performers walked slowly into the center of the
ring from where they'd been watching from the shadows, uncertain of
exactly what was transpiring, but prepared to do whatever it took
to keep the show going.

A shadowed figure hurried past the clowns
toward the lone exit. It passed under the spotlight just long
enough for Lauren to recognize the man with the cattle prod from
the elephant pen.

The camera jerked back to where the
ringmaster called for the audience's attention. Clowns cavorted
around him and trapeze artists hurriedly scaled the posts toward
their perches.

Abruptly, the squealing sound ceased.

The ringmaster smiled and laughed as though
it were all part of the show.

Two men ran over and grabbed him by the
jacket. The same men who had been tending to the lame elephant.

Screams erupted from everywhere at once.

The camera jerked to the left in time to
capture a shot of what looked like static boiling out of the
elephant's gut. Black dots expanded into a cloud, and the people in
the row in front of the camera jumped up from their seats,
eclipsing the view. Bodies hurtled past. Footsteps thundered on the
bleachers. The screams grew louder and louder until they reached an
awful crescendo that overwhelmed the recorder's microphone.

There was a loud clattering sound as the
camera fell to the man's feet.

A dark, slender shape with spindly legs and
a twitchy abdomen crawled across the lens.

The screams went on for what felt like an
eternity before dissolving into a crackling buzz.

The aperture focused in and out on the
blurry insect and the hand dangling from the bleachers beyond
it.

After several moments, another high-pitched
squeal sounded. Muffled this time, as though coming from far
away.

The wasp flew away from the lens.

A buzzing drone faded until only the squawk
of feedback remained.

And then there was only silence.

"Jesus," Cranston whispered.

Lauren echoed his sentiment. That was the
most horrible thing she had ever seen. So many people in pain, so
many dying in the worst possible manner.

Cranston looked at each of them in turn.

"I need to know what the hell those things
were, how they got into that elephant, and why they attacked like
that. I want to know where they went. I need to put a name to every
single one of those bodies. And I need to know what in the name of
God was in those stingers." He spun a slow circle. All eyes were on
him. "What are you waiting for?"

The group spurred to life at once.

Lauren turned and headed back toward the
tent. She was already making a mental checklist in her head. She
needed tissue and blood samples from the elephant, a cross-section
from several different corpses---

"Hey, doc!" Cranston called after her.

He jogged to catch up with her, took her by
the elbow, and spoke softly so that only she could hear.

"I don't have to tell you that time is a
critical factor here. With what's lined up in Atlanta, we need this
resolved as quickly and quietly as possible." He paused. "I really
don't like the timing of this."

Lauren nodded.