The Calm Before The Swarm (4 page)

She shuddered at the thought of willingly
allowing one of the corpses to become infested and torn apart on
her table while she leaned over it in a beekeeper's suit.

Right now, a team of medical examiners was
autopsying every tenth body. Thus far, the results were all the
same. Their deaths were the result of the sheer amount of venom
that hit the victims' bloodstreams at once, leading to anaphylactic
shock. Their windpipes had closed due to the natural histamine
reactions of their immune systems. In essence, they had all
asphyxiated as one.

Blood was the key. It pumped through a
complex highway of vessels that connected the heart to every organ,
from arteries to arterioles and finally into the tiny capillaries
that ran just beneath the surface of the skin and back again
through venules and veins. This was the route that nearly every
pathogenic microbe used to reach its ultimate destination inside
the body. Airborne viruses accessed it through the mucus membranes
in the respiratory tract and directly through the lungs. For other
diseases, all it took was a simple transfer of fluids, or, in some
cases, just the slightest physical contact or a passing of germs
via a fomite like a doorknob. In this case, she suspected the wasps
laid their eggs subcutaneously, and upon hatching, the larvae
traveled through the blood into the digestive system where there
was room to grow in the nutrient-rich maze of hollow tubes, in much
the same fashion as tapeworms.

She studied the blood samples through an
electron microscope on slides her lab assistants had prepared.
Whole blood had been treated with heparin to prevent coagulation,
while other samples had been centrifuged, which broke them down
into their individual components. The skin and superficial samples
of the human remains had all reflected what one would expect from a
wasp sting. Nothing more, nothing less. The elephant's bowels had
also been relatively normal, minus the sections where the
ovipositors had become impaled in the lining. The mucosa had been
dramatically inflamed in the immediate vicinity of the stingers,
but there was no sign of infection or other physiological reaction,
which suggested that the wasps had merely been content to develop
inside of the animal until the external stimulus triggered the
instinct that caused them to chew their way out. Eventually, the
elephant would have starved to death, had it not been gutted from
within first.

The sample of blood she now studied under
1000x magnification was from the man she had encountered on the
lawn outside the fairgrounds, the bald man who'd been designated
Number One by the pink flag near his head. He had presumably been
nearest the exit flaps of the big top when everything had started
to happen and made a break for it. He hadn't even made it a hundred
yards. His blood was fairly common, which made him a good test
subject. O positive. Clear toxicology screen, minus the
preponderance of melittin. Standard increase in white blood cells
to combat the sudden onslaught. Normal red blood cell and platelet
counts. The only thing they found that shouldn't have been there
were the small white ovals that vaguely resembled the platelets,
only they were about a hundred times larger and less prevalent by a
factor of ten thousand. Extrapolating the sample size to that of
the entire bloodstream still intimated that there were hundreds of
thousands of what she assumed to be egg sacs floating through the
host.

Further magnification of the white ovals
confirmed they had no method of locomotion. No flagella or cilia.
They were at the mercy of the current. They appeared to be
encapsulated in some sort of gelatinous protein coating with a
mucus-like consistency that prevented it from sticking to any of
the blood cells, the vessel lumen, or the other egg sacs. If that
was indeed what they were. At this point, she could only
speculate.

Lauren replaced the whole blood slide with
one featuring the white dots exclusively. They'd been centrifuged
to isolate them and placed in a saline solution. She wanted to test
an idea that had been percolating in her head. The pH of blood was
slightly basic---roughly 7.4---in comparison to that of the digestive
tract. The small bowel maintained a slightly more acidic pH level
of approximately 6.6, but that was nothing compared to the stomach,
which pumped out gastric acid with a pH of under 2. Enteric drugs
like acetaminophen and ibuprofen were coated with gelatin to ensure
that the active ingredients wouldn't be released until they hit the
stomach, where they would be absorbed as they progressed through
the small bowel.

"Prepare a point five percent solution of
hydrochloric acid," she said. "That should approximate the acidity
of the stomach. And set up another slide with several of the egg
sacs."

Lauren slid the slide out and waited for the
new one. She scooted back from the video monitor attached to the
microscope and turned it so they would all be able to see the
reaction.

One of her assistants passed her a slide
with an indentation the size of a thumbprint in the center. The
sample was nearly invisible until she locked it into place under
the lens. She focused on what looked like a cluster of white
grapes, then increased the magnification until they filled the
screen.

She leaned back from the monitor and felt
the others crowd around her. All sounds of activity died. The
resultant silence was marred only by the sounds of excited
breathing and the hum of machinery.

Another assistant appeared at her side,
holding the dilution she had requested.

Lauren gave him approval to proceed with a
nod, and focused on the image on the screen.

The lens drew out of focus as the tip of a
glass pipette appeared. A globule of fluid shivered and fell away.
Then another. The cluster of eggs floated apart, then began to
effervesce. The outer coating disintegrated into a fine white
particulate mist. In the center of each, a dark shape drew
contrast. It looked like a ring at first, before slowly opening
into a C-shape. The remainder of the egg sac dissolved, leaving
only a pale halo in the fluid around the larvae, like the whites of
broken eggs around the yolks.

The larvae all started to wriggle at once,
worming back and forth through the acidic solution.

"My God," Lauren whispered.

Blood flowed through the human body at a
rate of anywhere between one-tenth of a centimeter per second in
the peripheral vessels to forty centimeters per second near the
trunk.

Conservative estimates suggested it had
taken less than two minutes for the venom to trigger the fatal
reaction that had caused all of the people in the tent to
asphyxiate.

That was more than enough time for the eggs
to pass through the bloodstream and enter the gastrointestinal
tract, where they had been sitting in a puddle of stomach acid for
more than sixteen hours now.

She imagined the massive quarantine room. It
was negatively pressurized to prevent the air inside the chamber
from contaminating the outside air. Was it sealed tightly enough
that nothing could crawl out through the ducts?

She pictured the rows of body bags and the
remains inside of them, their bowels expanding with the gasses of
decomposition and teeming with wasp larvae.

She envisioned the corpses still lying in
the field, out in the open, and the group of agents working the
scene around them. The bowels churning even beneath the graying
flesh.

And worst of all, she imagined a swarm of
wasps hundreds of times the size of the one that had eaten through
the elephant and killed every patron in the stands in a matter of
seconds rolling over the suburbs of Atlanta like a storm cloud.

"The last of the remains just arrived,"
Lauren said. "If nothing else, at least we can be certain that the
threat is contained."

"We've had crop dusters buzzing overhead all
day, dropping insecticides over the entire area, as you requested,"
Cranston said. His face filled the laptop monitor. Behind him, she
could just see the pinnacle of the big top. "You're certain we have
this under control now?"

"Not in the slightest."

"Very reassuring."

"It's a reasonable assertion that all of the
wasps would have been drawn to the amplifiers and drowned in the
lake, but we simply can't take that chance. Some could have flown
off into the woods; hence, the insecticides. Or they could have
stung a possum or a dog or livestock in one of the nearby
fields---"

"I get the picture."

"What about the sound frequency?"

"We have a team of experts analyzing it as
we speak. The problem is that so far they've been able to isolate
nearly a dozen different frequencies from the digital recording,
ranging from sub- to supersonic, all of them overlaid on separate
tracks." He turned and nodded to someone off-screen. "You know
there's only one way to determine which frequency's our
trigger."

"Yeah." Lauren shuddered at the prospect.
"Have your men send me the samples when they're ready."

"Careful what you wish for." Cranston again
turned to the side and whispered to someone out of sight. His eyes
were alight when he looked back into the camera. "We think we might
have found something. You know better than I do what we should be
looking for. I want you to walk through it with me. Okay, doc?"

Before she could reply, Cranston grabbed the
video camera with a rustling sound. She saw his palm, and then what
might have been his ear. When the image settled, she was staring at
a handful of agents in FBI windbreakers. They were unloading
bulletproof vests and assault rifles from the back of an unmarked
van. When they closed the doors, she saw the sign for the camel
rides and the dirt pen. A blue vest blocked her view for a
split-second. Cranston must have attached the camera to some sort
of mount on his hat or on a headset.

"Still with me, doc?"

His voice was louder and distorted, his
breathing harsh. A microphone in front of his mouth, she
assumed.

"What's going on?"

"We've been doing a systematic physical
search of the premises. Remember that trailer we saw the guy with
the hat go into? The one by the elephants? One of my agents found a
set of keys sitting on the counter that didn't fit any of the
trailer's locks." He started to run while he was talking. The image
on the screen bounced with his exertions. His heavy exhalations
echoed all around her small office. She recognized the path leading
up through the sycamores toward the dirt parking lot, then the rows
of cars that would eventually have to be towed. "The keys weren't
high on our priority list, at least not at first. But considering
how that guy was acting and the fact that the trailer appeared to
be his base of operations, we had to follow up on them. We
eventually found that one of the keys unlocked a pickup truck in
the parking lot. The door of the camper trailer hitched to it was
wired with explosives."

"Explosives?"

"C4. We're obviously not dealing with a
low-rent operation here."

"Why would...?" Lauren's voice trailed off as
the image focused on a black Ford F-150 and the Wildwood trailer
hooked to its fender. It was parked it the middle of the lot as
though in an effort to be invisible. And yet the keys had been left
out on the counter and the trailer door rigged with explosives. It
didn't make sense, though. If it wasn't meant to be found, why
leave the keys behind and go to the effort of setting up the booby
trap?

Something else bothered her about the
situation, something she couldn't quite pin down.

On the screen, two men wearing full bomb
squad gear stepped away from the trailer door. Cranston paused only
long enough to look at another agent and give a sharp nod. The
agent pulled the door open and Cranston climbed up into the
darkness, leading with his pistol. She heard shouts from the other
agents, identifying themselves, warning anyone inside.

A burst of light that the aperture struggled
to rationalize.

She saw a countertop. A rusted sink.
Cupboards. An unmade bed. A dirty tabletop. The mirror on the
closed bathroom door. The patterned linoleum floor. The view
shifted quickly in time with Cranston's stare as he tried to
capture every detail at once. The trailer rocked as more men
climbed inside.

"Open that door!" Cranston shouted.

He stepped back and Lauren stared down the
length of his arms and the sightline of his pistol at his
reflection on the bathroom door.

Whoever was responsible had created the
perfect untraceable killing machines in the wasps. A bomb was
beneath the skills of someone who could play God with the genes of
half a dozen species.

"This isn't right," Lauren whispered.

The trailer was meant to be found, and there
was only one reason she could think of as to why.

"Don't open the door!" she screamed.

An agent drew the bathroom door open with a
squeal. She watched, helpless, as Cranston stepped forward into the
small room. There was a loud shriek of feedback from an alarm on
the door. Everything was yellow plastic. The walls, the sink, the
showerhead, the toilet. Everything except for the listless cocker
spaniel sprawled on the floor in a crusted puddle of urine. Flies
swirled around it, crawled on its eyes. Its fur was matted and
clumped, its abdomen distended, its rectum prolapsed. It tried to
raise its head, but dropped it heavily back to the ground.

"Oh, Christ," Cranston said.

The dog whimpered and the fur on its flank
ruffled as though blown by a sudden gust of wind.

"Out!" Cranston shouted. "Everyone out!
Goddamn it! Everybody---!"

A feverish buzzing sound erupted with the
cloud of wasps that boiled out of the dog's side. The tatters of
skin flapped back like a baked potato. She saw the insects shooting
straight toward the camera and then Cranston was in motion. An
agent's face, eyes wide with terror. A collision. Tumbling to the
floor. Panicked cries. The incessant buzzing. The whine of
feedback. Cranston crawling over another man's body. He fell
through the doorway and collapsed onto the ground. Shadows darted
in and out of view, so close to the lens that it couldn't clearly
capture them. Legs running away from her.