Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  “Who, Harry?” Shawna wanted to know. “Who would be this fucking low?”

  “Our own government, I would guess.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Certain segments of it at any rate. Trust me, Shawna, unless I’m totally confused here, that’s who these people are.” He thought it over, narrowed his eyes. “I keep thinking about those white rubber suits they wore. They don’t have to be for nuclear contamination, you know. They’re called NBC suits—nuclear, biological, chemical.”

  Shawna didn’t buy it. “C’mon, Harry. Listen to yourself, will you? Someone spilled some nerve gas or dropped a vial of cholera or something and now they’re going around murdering people to cover it up? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “Vaguely, darling, vaguely.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “And why not?”

  “Well, that’s... that’s like a conspiracy, Harry. That doesn’t really happen.”

  “Doesn’t it?” His face was green in the dashboard lights. “Well, I beg to differ, sweetheart. I’ve seen half a dozen of these things in operation. I know the feel and I know the stink of absolute power. Do you really think underworld heavies snatch people in the middle of the day? That they walk around in protective suits and sterilize their enemies? C’mon, Shawna.”

  “I don’t know, Harry.”

  “Listen, you little idiot. You’re into shit up to your pretty little ass and the men who are dumping on you are above the law. Maybe I’m wrong. But if I’m not—and I’m damn sure I’m not—then you are in trouble. If they’d kill your landlady just to set you up, you can bet they’ll do the same to you.”

  Shawna wasn’t saying much now.

  “But if you need proof, I think we’re about to get it.”

  Shawna looked behind them.

  A police car was coming up fast with its lights blazing.

  DETROIT: RIVERFRONT

  4:59 A.M.

  Johnny Kopok must’ve passed out because the next thing he knew he could hear voices. He pulled himself up on one elbow and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

  “No, no,” he could hear Lou saying. “Oh please motherfucker, no...”

  He thought maybe Lou was having a nightmare or something. But as he looked closer, he could see there were three guys there with him. The moonlight wasn’t too bright, but bright enough to see some things. The guys with Lou looked like those skinheads that had been showing up around the city more and more of late. The kind with the bald heads and the tattoos. They’d been breeding like rats in a sewer.

  “What—” Johnny started to say but stopped.

  The words caught in his throat as he saw two of them hold old Lou down while the third did something horrible. Johnny saw it and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. But he knew what he was smelling—something rank and damp like the water in a clogged drainage ditch. That, but worse. An awful black, almost evil stink.

  He wanted to be sick, but he didn’t dare look away.

  Oh my Christ.

  Something was coming out of the guy’s mouth. The one that was sitting on Lou’s chest. Something glistening white. As Johnny watched, it slid right down Lou’s throat.

  Johnny wanted to puke right then.

  But he couldn’t. He had to sit there and ride it out, chewing his fist like a baby until those freaks were done.

  Johnny’s head filled with fuzz and he was lost in the war again.

  When he woke, the skinheads were gone. He steeled himself, not remembering the last time he’d been so godawful scared. He crawled as silently as possible over to Lou. Lou’s face was dappled with moonlight, his jaws sprung wide.

  “Lou? Lou?” he gasped. “You okay?”

  Lou’s skin was like ice.

  Johnny was hoping it was all some crazy, boozy nightmare, but the fear, the raw ugly terror, just wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t until something moved in Lou’s belly, right beneath Johnny’s hand that he screamed.

  Then he ran until he dropped.

  CHICAGO SOUTHSIDE, HYDE PARK:

  UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICAL CENTER

  5:17 A.M.

  In the morgue, Bridey O’Donnel did what she did best.

  She’d examined three bodies since coming in at midnight, but those cadavers had been simple; any third year med student could’ve arrived at the same results as she. The first was a heart attack, the other two gang members shot at close range. One of them, a young man of twenty, had been executed in classic gangland style: three bullets to the head—nine millimeter, she thought—at close range. The other, and messier of the two, was barely sixteen. He’d taken a load of buckshot to the chest. He was nearly torn in half.

  The first boy was black and the second was Hispanic. The Hispanic boy—Ramon Alverez—had been wearing a crucifix, but as Bridey well knew, there was no God in Southside Chicago.

  After she finished the endless reams of paperwork that accompanied any cadaver, she started on the next one.

  This one, she knew, wouldn’t be so simple.

  Snapping on her latex gloves, Bridey sighed, and began to speak. The red light on the voice-activated recorded blinked on.

  “Subject is a white John Doe,” she said, cutting his clothes away with scissors and dropping them into an evidence box. “Approximately forty years of age. Cause of death unknown, though emaciation is apparent. No external signs of trauma. A tattoo on his right forearm reads J.J.K. with a heart speared by a knife.”

  The recorder clicked off.

  She gave the body a thorough external exam. There were no entry wounds or exit wounds. An appendix scar on his lower abdomen, something that might have been an old knife wound on his chest. Beyond that, nothing seemed out of order. What did puzzle her, though, was the swelling of the abdominal cavity. The man was horribly shrunken as if from some wasting disease, but his belly was full and round. It was more than normal distention due to collection of gases. Strange.

  Where the hell was Frank with those X-rays?

  She sighed, shaking her head. If she waited for him it could be an hour, maybe two. Radiology tended to give priority to the living.

  Bridey wasn’t a large woman. At 5’8, she barely weighed 120 pounds. So it was no easy task for her to lift and shift her John Doe for the external. Thin as he was, he still made an ungainly corpse to lug about. She did it, but it took time and a lot of straining.

  When she was done, her face was beaded with sweat.

  “Didn’t miss any meals did you, buddy boy?” she said.

  The red light of the recorder was on, she noticed. It was like being watched by Big Brother with that damn thing. If you sneezed or coughed it came on.

  “Got a present for you,” a voice said, startling her.

  It was Frank with the X-rays.

  “Great. Just in time. Set ‘em up for me, will ya?”

  “Will do,” Frank said. He clipped them to the screen. “I think you’re going to like these. Or not like them, depending on your mood.”

  Bridey sighed. Whenever he said something like that it meant there was going to be trouble. It had been a long night. She did not want anything that challenged her fuzzy brain at this hour of the morning.

  Frank was a radiological technician. He’d actually finished pre-med before he decided he didn’t care for cutting up dead bodies. It wasn’t uncommon.

  “Just check out these scans, Doc. Unreal.”

  Bridey did, studying them so closely her nose nearly brushed against the abdominal series. “My…God.”

  Frank bit his lip. “What did I tell you? It looks like this guy swallowed a hose.”

  Bridey stared and kept staring.

  There was a dark, snaking mass that looked very much like a hose winding its way through the intestines.

  “Look at the dilation of those bowels, Frank.”

  Frank nodded. “Tell me about it. That colon must be big around as a Coke can.”

  “Bigger,” Bridey said. “Much bigger. More like a quart of Coke.”
>
  “Is that even possible?”

  Bridey just lifted an eyebrow. “Why not?”

  “What could cause that?”

  “I’ve got a few ideas,” she said, “but there’s only one way to find out.”

  “This is where I check out.” He looked a little pale.

  “C’mon, Frank where’s your sense of adventure? Besides, Rick’s on break and Sheila called in sick. I need some help. You’re not afraid are you?”

  Frank glanced around the room. The sickly green tiles that climbed half way up the walls. The stainless steel tables. The refrigerators. The sinks. The scales. The racks of specimen jars and chemicals. The instruments gleaming dully in the fluorescent overheads.

  It was too much like the dissection room in anatomy class.

  “I... I don’t think so.” He rubbed his belly gently. “This place gives me gas.”

  Bridey scowled at him. “You are afraid.”

  “Oh, don’t start with that business. I’m squeamish. What of it? I bet if I dropped a nice fat spider down your cleavage you’d be a little green, too.”

  “Well met, Frank.”

  “And well played.” He made a disgusted face. “If Iversen finds out I’m helping you instead of doing my own job... oh shit, all right. I’m not touching anything, though.”

  “Thanks, Frank. All you’ll have to do is help me move him. That’s all.”

  “That’s all, she says.”

  Inside, Bridey was grinning broadly. Poor old Frank. He was so easy to manipulate she just couldn’t help herself.

  No matter. The cadaver was what really interested her.

  She’d went through med school on a government grant. A federal program where Uncle Sam would finance your education with the proviso that after you’d been certified, you’d practice for slave wages in a free clinic on an Indian reservation or some such similarly depressed area. At the Hopi Reservation outside Flagstaff, Bridey did her time. One of the most interesting and unusual things that happened there was an outbreak of human tapeworms caused by poor sanitation. It was practically unheard of outside the third world.

  And that’s what she was thinking now: tapeworm. Parasitic worm infection.

  It looked much like one, save it was much larger.

  Selecting a scalpel, she intended to find out. She made the standard Y-incision for investigation of the thoraco-abdominal cavity. The incision began at each armpit and ran beneath both breasts to the bottom of the sternum where the incisions joined and proceeded down the center of the abdomen to the pubis. It didn’t take long.

  “What an expert you are,” Frank said, disgusted. “I’ll bet you’re a real demon with a rump roast.”

  She ignored him. The world around her was gone, there was only the anatomy before her and the impossibility it suggested.

  Using an oscillating saw, Bridey cut through the sternum and the front of the ribs. She then removed this section in one piece. Everything was pretty much laid open now. She ignored the pleura, the serous membrane which covers the lungs and lines the chest cavity. Her interest was solely in the peritoneal membrane and the viscera beneath.

  She cut through it, exposing the bowels.

  Jesus H. Christ... look at the size... the size...

  The duodenum and colon were swollen to the size of a man’s forearm, if not much larger. And the really strange, really impossible thing was that though they were cold and lifeless, they were throbbing, moving of their own volition.

  This is no tapeworm, she decided then and there. No tapeworm ever got that big, moved like that...

  “I don’t like this,” Frank said and Bridey could hear the tension in his voice.

  Her mouth felt like it was full of beach sand. She tried to swallow, but there was no spit.

  The scalpel poised above the transverse colon, she looked at Frank and he looked at her and she wondered if she was sweating like him. If her lower lip was trembling like his. If her eyes were bulging like those of a decompressing fish.

  You don’t have to do this, a voice told her. You can stop right now and get this guy in the freezer. Wait till Dr. Conniker gets here at eight. He’s been at it thirty odd years. He knows his shit even if he is an arrogant, racist bastard. You can do that and nobody would blame you because this whole thing is bad and it’s going to take you somewhere you just don’t want to go...

  Can’t you see that?

  She could, but she wasn’t going to stop.

  Deftly, carefully, she made a horizontal slit about six inches along the colon, her heart pounding in her ears, her lungs barely able to draw a breath.

  An odor rose from the incision. One that was beyond the smell of death, of waste. It was an awful salty rottenness like marshes and fetid swamps.

  “Holy shit,” Frank murmured, his voice puny and weak.

  “Can’t be... can’t...”

  The words trembled on Bridey’s lips. She felt helpless and small. Then something happened which could never adequately be envisioned—the bowels seemed to split with a rubbery shriek and a huge segmented white worm erupted from the belly of the dead man. It snaked and coiled obscenely in the air like a python considering a new branch to climb. By the time Bridey and Frank accepted what they were seeing, the thing—eyeless and glistening like wet plastic—surged at Bridey’s face. Her jaws sprung open with the impact and the thing pushed down her throat, moving with a repulsive juicy sound that Frank would never forget.

  He started screaming as she fell into him and spilled the both of them to the cool, tiled floor. The scream kept coming as he crawled frantically away from her, back-peddling on elbows and heels, the scream steadily becoming an insane, mindless sound.

  Bridey flopped around with boneless, spasmodic gyrations, about three feet of the worm hanging from her open mouth, twisting and hissing in the air with a stink of hot blood and steam.

  Frank collapsed against an instrument caddy, pissing himself and vomiting down his scrubs.

  Bridey’s body continued to writhe and contort, the worm wrapping its slimed length around her head. Something like a mouth opened. It made a squealing, mewling sound and disgorged a stream of black fluid into Frank’s face.

  His mind, which had clung to sanity by a tenuous thread, plummeted into blackness as the juice burned his flesh and blinded him. He clawed and tore at his eyes which swelled shut behind heavy meat-red sockets, a yellow mucus running from them like tears.

  He hit the floor, his scream now a high, screeching laughter that echoed in the confines of his skull, a dirge.

  In time, there was silence.

  Broken only by a pathetic sobbing and the wet, horrible feeding sounds of the worm.

  CHICAGO: NORTH SHORE, EN ROUTE

  5:36 A.M.

  As Harry Niles stumbled out of his GTO, he fell to his knees.

  “You been drinking, sir?” the cop asked.

  He was a Metro cop and although he looked completely normal, Shawna had to wonder if he were somehow mixed up in this... this conspiracy.

  “I had two beers,” Harry slurred. “No more. No less. What I do, officer? Run a stop sign or something?”

  Harry knew how it was done.

  He’d been pulled over enough times to know what cops expected of a drunk and he was giving it his all. Maybe when this was over he’d get an Academy Award. Probably just a jail cell, though, if he were lucky. Real lucky.

  Shawna came around the side of the car. “He’s drunk all right,” she said, trying desperately to sound trashy and cheap. “Drunk and behind the wheel. That’s his way, officer. Ain’t it yer way, Harry? Ain’t it?”

  The cop looked stressed. Maybe because he saw he was in for a real treat here. “Ma’am,” he said, speaking slowly. “Ma’am, please get back in the car.”

  Shawna pushed right past him. “Why don’t you tell him what you got in the trunk, you goddamn drunk?”

  “Ma’am, will you please—”

  “Tell him, dammit.” She moved in quick and gave Harry a litt
le kick in the side. It landed a little harder than she’d meant it to. Harry grunted and started swearing. The cop was on her before she could do any more damage.

  “Ma’am, please,” he said, pulling her back, “that’s enough.”

  And then Harry was on his feet. “No good tramp, that’s all she is.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, really warming up to this now. “Fuck you, you cheap sonofabitch! You goddamn drunk!”

  The cop had his hands full now, keeping them separated. “Knock this off or I’ll take you both in!” he snarled. But his heart clearly wasn’t in it.

  Harry made like he was going to hit Shawna and when the cop inserted himself conveniently between them. Harry fought in his grip, being very sloppy and uncoordinated. The cop spent most of his energy keeping Harry on his feet.

  “Fucking slut!” Harry spat, falling.

  Shawna nodded and brought out the slim little can of Mace. Before the cop knew which end was up, she gave him a full shot in the face. He went down, hollering and cursing, rubbing at his eyes.

  “Sorry about that,” Shawna said and gave him another blast for good measure.

  Then they were in Harry’s GTO, tooling down the highway.

  Harry drove another mile or so and then exited off Sheridan into Kenilworth where Gabe Hebberman lived. What he thought Gabe could do about any of this Shawna had no idea. But she supposed they needed somewhere to hide out.

  Especially now.

  God, do you realize what you’ve just done? Assaulting a police officer? Fleeing and eluding? Just great. Just fucking great.

  Already the cop was on his radio alerting half the state about the black GTO. They’d been lucky in many ways, though. First, that the cop was out alone. Second, that no other cops had stopped by to assist. And third that they had managed to pull off that crazy stunt in the first place.

  “Why do you keep Mace, Harry?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid of date rape,” he told her. “And who can blame me with the company I keep?”

  Shawna shook her head. “You never quit, do you?”

  “Not so far. It all depends on what you just got me into.”

  “What did I get you into?” It was a rhetorical question. She sighed deeply. “That cop’ll have everyone in the state looking for us and this car now.”