The Calm Before The Swarm (5 page)

A lone insect landed on the dirt in front of
the lens. Its blurry shape was nearly a foot wide on her laptop
screen. Its wings vibrated and its body twitched. And then it was
gone, leaving only the droning buzz in its wake.

Bodies scattered across the parking lot.

Silence crackled from her speakers.

Lauren started to cry.

Lauren entered the quarantine room wearing a
full beekeeper's suit. The white cotton and polyester blend fabric
hung loosely from her body, while the leather boots and gloves were
snug all the way up to her knees and biceps. She wore a helmet
under a hooded veil, which hung over her face to the middle of her
chest. Beneath the mesh was a biohazard mask with a Plexiglas face
shield and a mouthpiece attached to the portable oxygen tank
strapped to her back. All of the ventilation ducts had been plugged
with a two-foot layer of steel wool that would allow an
insecticidal mist to be forced into the room, but wouldn't permit
any of the wasps to pass through in the opposite direction. With
the impeded circulation, the air was stifling and oppressive,
despite the cooling units set up throughout the room to slow the
rate of decomposition. The smell was like nothing she had ever
experienced before. The body bags were stacked five-high against
the side walls in some places, and ran the length of the room. They
weren't going to be able to release the remains to the next of kin
until they were embalmed, the larvae flushed from their systems,
their blood replaced with formaldehyde.

They'd been able to keep a lid on the nature
of the disaster, at least for now. It was only a matter of time
before they needed to make a statement, however. Accidental
exposure to noxious gasses was undoubtedly the story they would
tell. In this case, a lie was more believable than the truth.

She walked through the main room to one of
the isolation chambers designed to contain patients with the most
heinous of communicable diseases like ebola or smallpox. She slid
back the glass door and entered the hermetically-sealed room. Two
gurneys were positioned side-by-side in the center. On top of each
was a corpse. The one on the left belonged to a circus clown they
had determined had no surviving relatives. On the right was Special
Agent Cranston, whose SAC had volunteered him posthumously for this
final assignment.

"Are you guys ready?" she asked, glancing up
at the camera to her right. One had been placed in each corner of
the room above massive amplifiers that stood nearly five feet
tall.

"
Whenever you are
," her assistant's
voice crackled through the intercom.

Lauren just wanted to get this over with.
They all knew how this was going to end. Sure, she could have been
sitting safely in the observation room with the others, but there
was one key behavioral component they still needed to evaluate
under controlled conditions, one which required someone to
physically remain in the room. They needed to witness the
spontaneous aggression. The cameras would digitally capture the
swarming attack and plot the individual wasps to determine any sort
of group patterns or individual dominance. Considering the fabric
didn't feel thick enough to protect her from a stiff breeze, she
wasn't surprised in the slightest that there had been no volunteers
for the experiment, which commenced when she nodded her
readiness.

"
Starting at eight hertz
."

Lauren watched both bodies, which had been
stripped from the waist up. She focused on their abdomens, waiting
for the first indication of movement beneath the skin. The sound
was so low that she felt it as a vibration deep in her chest
without hearing it.

All of the remains from the circus had been
identified and cross-referenced against every federal database in
hopes if discovering a motive for the attack. Other than a few
outstanding warrants, some unpaid traffic tickets, and a surprising
number of deadbeat fathers, there were no criminals of note.
Several had served time for petty offenses from possession to
larceny, but there were no connections to organized crime, foreign
governments, or groups on any of Homeland Security's watch
lists.

"
Moving on to sixty-five hertz
."

It produced a low, solid tone that reminded
her of a stomach growling. She watched and waited, knowing full
well that any second now she was going to come under siege by a
swarm of killer wasps.

None of the victims had been related to
prominent elected officials or celebrities in even the most
peripheral way. None of them had been wealthy by anyone's
definition, nor had any of them been party to any litigations or
class action lawsuits. The demographic profile fit the standard
rural American model. The ratio of Caucasians to minorities
couldn't have been less remarkable. To all involved, the attack at
the circus seemed to be the definition of random.

"
Nine hundred thirteen hertz
."

The sound reminded her of her childhood, of
her mother humming while she fixed dinner.

The precision of the randomness suggested
that someone had invested a great deal of thought into choosing the
exact location for a controlled experiment, not unlike the one they
were conducting at this very moment.

So far, they had yet to locate the man they
had seen on the video recordings. His body wasn't among the remains
in the room next door, nor were his face or fingerprints in any law
enforcement databases. The circus' employment records listed the
man as Dipak Patel, an animal handler of some renown, whose resume
included stints at the San Diego Zoo and as an animal wrangler for
several Hollywood films. They obviously hadn't followed up on his
references, for none of them had heard of the enigmatic Mr. Patel.
In fact, prior to his arrival at the circus, they could find no
evidence that Dipak Patel even existed.

"
Four-point-one kilohertz. How are you
holding up in there, Dr. Allen?
"

Lauren gave a thumbs-up. The sound became so
shrill that it raised the hackles on the backs of her arms.

The timing of Patel's appearance and now
disappearance was the most troubling part of the equation. Cranston
had been right in his initial assessment. This was all too
coincidental. The Super Bowl was set to kick off with a bang on
Sunday night, in what was slated to be the last game ever to be
played in the Georgia Dome before it was razed in favor of a more
modern stadium. With over seventy-two thousand people in attendance
and nearly twice that many pouring into the Atlanta area, among
them foreign dignitaries from around the world, a well-coordinated
strike could make the mass-casualty event at the circus pale by
comparison. Add in the more than one hundred million viewers across
the globe and it was an opportunity to make a statement the likes
of which had never been made before. Even the President of the
United States---a lifelong Detroit Lions fan---was scheduled to be a
guest in the owner's box when his team took the field for its first
appearance in the big game against the heavily favored Jacksonville
Jaguars.

"
Twelve kilohertz
."

The high-pitched sound pierced her. She
imagined it shattering wine glasses.

There was no way in the world that the game
would be postponed or moved to a different venue, despite the
insistent and repeated urgings of the FBI. The economic impact on
the region was estimated to be as much as four hundred million
dollars and there wasn't enough time to satisfactorily prepare
another city to host such a grand event. Besides, there was the
issue of saving face. Moving the game would be a tacit admission of
fear by a country that could ill afford to expose a chink in its
venerable armor. The Super Bowl was the ultimate expression of
American ideals; an unparalleled spectacle of excess on an almost
hedonistic scale. To allow the possibility of a strike to alter it
in any way would be a betrayal of the American way and a
demonstration of weakness that would open the door to the kind of
terrorists who were waiting for just such an opportunity. Like
every Super Bowl following 9-11, this year's game had been declared
a National Special Security Event by the Department of Homeland
Security and would be policed like a sovereign military state unto
itself.

"
Sixteen kilohertz. Anything at all
yet?
"

Lauren shook her head. The sound was so
shrill it felt as though it originated from the center of her
brain.

Regardless of the DHS's assurances and the
countermeasures already in place, she had a bad feeling about this.
Preventing someone from crashing a plane into the dome or sneaking
explosives or weapons into the stadium was one thing, but how could
they possibly detect wasp larvae that could easily be smuggled
inside anyone in attendance? Hell, all someone would need to do is
park within range and trigger the sound frequency to awaken the
insects inside a dog in the back seat of a car or a mounted
policeman's horse. There were too many variables outside of their
control, and it didn't help that their mandate was to keep a lid on
the slaughter at the circus until after the event. They were
playing with fire and it seemed as though she was the only one
willing to admit it. Theirs may have been the most powerful empire
the planet had ever known, but its aura of invincibility was
illusory.

"
Twenty-two kilohertz. Here's where
things get interesting.
"

The high-pitched sound was replaced
by...nothing. They had passed into the supersonic range.

She heard a faint crinkling sound, like
someone crumpling paper. She looked from one man's belly to the
next. There was no sign of movement. Just pale skin mottled by
flaccid blue veins and---

Wait.

There.

"Are you guys seeing this back there?"

"
Nothing yet. What do you---?
"

The man on the left erupted first. There was
the merest ripple of skin, and then a tattered hole appeared and
the air filled with wasps. The speed with which it transpired was
staggering. She had seen it happen to the cocker spaniel with her
own eyes, and yet she was still caught off-guard. She never even
saw Cranston's abdomen tear open. God. She could hardly see
anything through the sheer number of wasps swarming around her.
They were all over her, crawling on her mesh mask, thrusting their
stingers at her face, trying to sting her through the fabric. They
were still juveniles, perhaps a third of the size of adult wasps
and not yet fully developed, but no less terrifying. She stumbled
forward, madly brushing them off. All she could see was the mass of
seething bodies mere inches from her face that could kill her in a
matter of seconds. The fabric felt too thin; their combined weight
pressed it to her skin. A scream rose in her chest and burst past
her lips, but the buzzing was so loud that she hardly heard it. She
fell to her knees and swatted at the wasps on her veil. Carcasses
crunched underneath her and she was certain that stingers prodded
through the suit and into her knees. An all-consuming, blind panic
took root. Screaming and thrashing, she tried to scurry away from
them, but they were everywhere. All over her. Crawling under her
hood, beneath her clothes, in her hair. She was certain of it.

She was going to die.

Lauren screamed and screamed until her
throat was raw and she started to cough.

She opened her eyes and fought back the
terror. The wasps were still everywhere, but they hadn't penetrated
her defenses. There were no stingers in her skin. She was going to
be all right. Slowly, she rose to her feet and brushed the wasps
away from her eyes so she could see. Both of the corpses were
crawling with them. Over and over, they stung the lifeless bodies
and returned to the air, only to be replaced by a seemingly
inexhaustible supply.

"Go ahead," she said.

"
Are you okay in there for sure, Dr.
Allen?
"

She nodded and manipulated the chemical
respirator under her face shield over her mouth. A fog descended
from the ceiling and settled toward the floor. The shadowed forms
of the insects were nearly invisible through the toxic cloud as
they succumbed to the poison and dropped to the ground.

Their carcasses crackled underfoot like she
was walking on bubble wrap as she studied the aftermath. There were
so many of them that any effort to count them would be a waste of
time they didn't have.

The buzzing sound diminished, and then
ultimately ceased altogether.

The corpses were black with stingers. It was
impossible to tell what they might have once looked like, or even
what color their skin had been.

This was their worst fear realized.

How could they prevent an attack that could
kill countless thousands when they couldn't see where the wasps
were hiding or hear the sound that initiated their assault?

Atlanta, Georgia

The spectacle was like nothing she'd ever
seen before. The tailgating had begun in earnest the day before,
and by the time she arrived not long after sunrise, the parking lot
was shoulder-to-shoulder with people as far as she could see. There
were news crews from around the world, speaking in languages
ranging from every possible dialect of English to some she had
never heard in her life. The NFL Experience---a fantastic exhibit
where everyone, from kids through adults, could learn what it was
like to play in the pros through the use of pseudo-virtual reality
technology---had drawn nearly as many patrons as the game itself.
There were people drinking, grilling, fighting, playing, swearing,
and cavorting everywhere she looked. They wore jerseys and face and
body paint and reminded her of infantries preparing to go into
battle. And all of them were blissfully unaware of the threat that
could at any moment kill every single one of them.