The Calm Before The Swarm (7 page)

The entire stadium roared again.

The ball hit the net and tumbled down toward
the turf.

She felt relief like she'd never experienced
before as the agents led the man into the aisle, his arms cuffed
behind him, and shoved him up the stairs to where a dozen armed men
waited.

The man sat across from her, his ankles and
wrists shackled and connected to another chain around his waist,
which was, in turn, fastened to an eyebolt in the floor of the
modified transport carrier. He stared across the bed of the
enclosed cab at her from that horrible painted lion's face, itself
significantly less menacing than what she saw behind his sadistic
black eyes. Had she not known they were there, she never would have
been able to detect the latex cheek, nose, chin and brow
prosthetics that dramatically altered the configuration of his
face. But that was him, all right, the mass murderer responsible
for the deaths of more than three hundred men, women and children
at the Lithium Springs Fairgrounds. Sitting not more than four feet
away from her, studying her in the expectant silence as the road
shuddered beneath them and the four soldiers, one to either side of
each of them, fondled their assault rifles, praying for any excuse
to use them.

Lauren wore the beekeeper's suit that had
protected her earlier. The Marine unit wore matching outfits in
woodland camo. The yet-to-be-identified man wore no such
protection. Lauren was anxious to get him into the CT scanner to
see what was inside of him, but based on his distended abdomen and
the foul scent that radiated from the seepage in the seat of his
pants, she had a pretty good idea of what she would find. Every few
minutes, he doubled over in obvious pain, but always recovered and
offered them the kind of smug, bloody-lipped grin she was certain
the devil himself wore.

She turned the small metallic object over
and over in her gloved hands. It was a simple device, one found at
any pet store around the world, and yet one that was as deadly as
any detonator.

"Give it a blow," the soldier beside her
said. "Just a little one. Let's see what being eaten alive from the
inside out does to that fucking smile."

Lauren clenched the dog whistle in her fist
and looked away. There was a part of her that wanted nothing
more.

"
Tied at seven, midway through the third
quarter
," the driver said through the two-way intercom mounted
overhead.

"Tight game and we're missing it thanks to
this douche bag," the guard to the man's right said. "You say this
truck's perfectly sealed, right doc?"

The man continued to stare directly at her
with that horrible expression on his face. Lauren felt the same
crawling sensation on her skin she remembered so well from the
first time she wore this suit.

"We found your disposable cell phone. Hey,
you listening to me, asshole? We're tracing the number of the call
you made right before we got you," the guard to the man's left
said. He held the phone only inches from the man's face. "Started
celebrating a little early, didn't you, Mohammed or Mahmud or
whatever the hell your name is? It's only a matter of time before
we take out your whole damn terrorist cell. Maybe we'll get you all
together in a little room and blow that whistle of yours."

"Aren't you supposed to do one of those
Jihadi
loo-loo-loo-loo-loo
whoops before you do
yourself?"

The men in camo laughed, their faces shadows
behind their netting.

The truck slowed and veered to the right.
Lauren recognized the driveway leading deeper into the CDC complex
by the gentle side-to-side swaying and the rocking of the speed
bumps. They slowed, and then sped up again.

"
Passing through perimeter security
now
," the driver said from the other side of the
steel-reinforced barrier. "
You sure your guys are expecting
us?
"

"My people have been on stand-by since
yesterday afternoon," Lauren said. "Pull around to the rear
entrance. There'll be a team ready and waiting to assist with the
prisoner transfer."

"We're staying with him every step of the
way," the man to her left said.

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

The Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory
was in Building 18. Lauren had been driving this route for so long
that she recognized each of the turns without being able to see
them, right down to the swooping ramp that led up to the building.
The truck slowed and stopped. The engine continued to idle.

"
We're at the service entrance, doc. But
there's no one waiting for us.
"

"What are you talking about? Are you sure
you're at the right entrance?"

"
Without a doubt
."

"Where are your people?" the man across from
her asked. They were the first words he had spoken. His Arabic
accent was affected by stilted British inflection. "Is this the
point where I should say
loo-loo-loo-loo-loo
?"

His predatory smile grew impossibly wide,
crocodilian.

"Let me out," Lauren whispered.

"
Convoy's moving out, doc. Something's
not right. No way in hell we're sticking around to find
out---
"

"Let me out!" Lauren screamed.

The rear door opened from the outside and
Lauren scurried down onto the pavement in the midst of the
twelve-vehicle convoy. There were military Jeeps and black SUVs. A
helicopter thumped high above the treetops. She barely stepped to
the side in time to keep from being run over by the transport
vehicle in its hurry to back out. The other cars closed rank around
it and hurriedly guided it back toward the main road with the
squeal of rubber.

Two cars stayed with her; one a troop
transport bearing a half-dozen armed soldiers, the other a federal
SUV with the silhouettes of four agents behind the tinted
windows.

She sprinted toward the glass doors and
stopped dead in her tracks. A handful of wasps crawled on the
inside of the glass, stinging at the transparent barrier. The tips
of their abdomens left tiny smudges from the holes where their
stingers had once been. As she watched, one of them dropped to the
floor onto a mat of lifeless insect carcasses.

Lauren's horror gave way to a kind of
detached numbness as she walked through the hallways toward her
lab. Dead wasps crunched underfoot. Her heartbeat thudded in her
ears, punctuating the restless humming of the fluorescent tube
lights. All else was silent. She passed the doorways of private
offices, through which she saw the occasional body sprawled on the
floor, head misshapen, clutching at its swollen throat. When she
reached the lobby, she involuntarily stopped and stifled a gasp.
The security officer at the desk had toppled backward in his chair.
His face was so livid with fluid that his features were all but
obscured. There were other corpses, felled in mid-stride, arms
extended as though trying to drag themselves forward across the
tile floor after their legs had failed them, but it was the lone
figure at the epicenter of the nightmare, crumpled in a wide pool
of shimmering blood, that drew Lauren's attention. The woman's
abdomen had been torn open from sternum to pubis. The frayed edges
of her dress framed the mess of macerated viscera that bloomed in
sickly gray folds from her peritoneum. Despite the sheer number of
stings to her face, Lauren recognized the woman immediately. It was
the same raven-haired woman she had seen on the video, near the
elephant pens, staring down at the sick pachyderm with terror
etched onto her face. The woman she had erroneously mistaken for
pregnant. A disposable cell phone---the twin to the one they had
taken from the man at the game---rested only inches from her curled
fingertips.

A cluster of wasps wheeled high above her,
near the skylights. Several dropped to the floor and writhed at her
feet.

The sound of footsteps reached her from
behind as the soldiers thundered down the corridor in their heavy
boots. They now wore camouflaged beekeeper's suits and carried
automatic rifles. They assumed command the moment they entered the
lobby. One barked orders while the others scattered in surreal
movements that made her feel like she was witnessing the scene from
underwater. One of the soldiers spoke into his transceiver, then
picked up the cell phone, held it away from his body, and waited.
The view screen lit up with the incoming call, but there was no
ringtone. At least not one that she could hear. The few surviving
wasps up in the rafters descended upon the phone in the man's hand.
He allowed them to crawl on his glove as he scrolled through the
list of incoming calls. He nodded pointedly to the soldier who
appeared to be in charge.

"We were set up," the man with the phone
said. "They used the game as a ruse to get all of us in one place,
out of their way."

It took Lauren a moment to grasp the
implications of the statement.

"No!" she cried.

She whirled and broke into a sprint toward
her lab. Panic flooded her veins. She started to hyperventilate,
felt the warmth of tears on her cheeks.

"Please, God," she whimpered.
"Please...no..."

She veered into the corridor to her wing and
tripped over a body on the floor. They were everywhere. On the
floor. In the doorways. Huddled together as though in an effort to
attenuate the assault. Heads deformed by stingers. Bodies contorted
by pain. Her team. Her entire team. All of the men and women beside
whom she'd worked through the years, with whom she had jostled for
space over microscopes and in clean rooms, with whom she'd labored
and laughed, with whom she'd shared drinks and stories...

Dead.

All dead.

Her colleagues...her friends...every single one
of them...dead.

Lauren crawled over the cold remains without
looking at the woman's face. She somehow found her feet and managed
to stagger through the maze of corpses to the quarantine room.

She stood outside of the airlock, her thumb
poised over the fingerprint scanner to disengage the lock, knowing
full well what she'd find inside.

This had never been about the three hundred
people at the circus or even the hundred and fifty thousand at the
Super Bowl. It was never about a political or religious statement
to be viewed by millions around the world on live television.

It was much worse than that.

Lauren entered the air lock and passed the
chemical showers and isolation suits hanging from the walls. She
used her thumbprint to open the final seal and stared dumbly at the
stainless steel door as it opened.

She sobbed as she staggered into the chilled
room, and found it exactly as she had expected.

The body bags that had been stacked
five-high to either side of the room...

The corpses teeming with countless millions
of wasp larvae...

Gone.

Atlanta, Georgia

Lauren curled up under a blanket on the
couch in the living room of her upscale Centennial Park North
townhouse, not far from Centennial Olympic Park and the Georgia
Aquarium. The space was dark, thanks to the aluminum sheets sealed
over the windows and affixed to the seams around the doors. The
brass glare from the lone lamp on the table beside her provided the
only illumination. It cast strange webbed shadows on the walls from
the multiple layers of mosquito netting she had strung up in the
center of the room. Inside the mesh tent were only the couch, an
end table, and a coffee table on top of which her television
perched. Her beekeeper's suit was folded neatly on the cushion
beside her. She fondled the remote control and tried to summon the
courage to press the power button to turn it on.

It was Easter Day. More than two months had
passed and they were still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Every emergency from the police to the military waited at
heightened levels of preparedness, while FEMA was all set to swoop
in and manage the aftermath. They all prayed that nothing would
happen, and with each passing day, their hopes rose. The
public-at-large was blissfully unaware of the threat, and, by
Presidential decree, would remain that way until the very last
moment. She could feel their overall confidence growing as one week
bled into the next without incident, until it bordered on
arrogance.

But Lauren knew better. This was the calm
before the storm.

The missing bodies were incubating their
lethal parasites.

And it was only a matter of time before they
were fully mature.

The woman who had served as the host vessel
for the wasps that had killed her team at the CDC had been
identified as Niraj Khouri, an architect and project manager for
New South Construction, the company that had underbid the
competition for the expansion of the east wing of the Emerging
Infectious Diseases building. Her background had been thoroughly
vetted and security clearance issued. The same had gone for each
and every member of her thirty-eight man crew, which had been
behind schedule and working, fully staffed, on a Sunday to catch
up. No one had thought it suspicious at the time, even considering
it was Super Bowl Sunday, the day the entire world simply stopped
turning. Within minutes of Khouri's attack, her crew had
materialized through the swarms of wasps in the hallways outside of
the quarantine room in full beekeeper's garb, driving wheeled
pallets, kicking the bodies of Lauren's colleagues out of the way
to clear a path. They had bypassed the security doors in seconds,
heaped the carts with body bags, and vanished back into the
construction zone. In less than twenty minutes, from start to
finish, a caravan of three New South panel trucks passed through
the main security gate, promptly split up, and disappeared onto the
highways and back roads. Not one of them had turned up yet.