Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  “Or maybe not.”

  She looked at him. “How do you figure?”

  “It all depends on what’s going on here.”

  They drove in silence after that.

  Shawna sat there, arms folded, feeling quite hopeless and helpless. She wondered if this conspiracy or whatever the hell you wanted to call it could possibly go this deep. She supposed it was possible. Maybe if those were government men and they had the cops working with them, maybe none of this would be handled in the usual way. Maybe a typical manhunt would not ensue.

  But she couldn’t believe that.

  They had just assaulted a police officer. There was no way they could let that lay. It would have to be handled through normal channels.

  Yes, it sure as hell would, she thought nervously. If these guys were government types—CIA, FBI, whatever—and they were involved in some bizarre, hush-hush operation, then it would be unlikely they would have the local John Laws working with them. They might have them pick someone up for questioning or throw someone in the can overnight, but that would be the extent of it. The cops wouldn’t be involved in the conspiracy any further than that.

  “Do you think the cops are in on this, Harry?”

  He shrugged with a slow roll of his shoulders. “Not to any extent. I think the feds, or whoever these guys are, murdered your landlady and set you up with the knife. That’s obvious. Then maybe they called the cops with an anonymous tip. The cops are just doing what cops do.”

  She had to agree with him.

  If this was a secret operation, then involving Chicago’s finest would not only be sloppy but make the entire thing very public in short order. Somehow, knowing the police weren’t involved in this nightmare restored her faith in humanity. It calmed her, lessened the paranoia that had been eating at her. There was nothing worse than thinking the entire world was ganging up on you.

  “Do you think they could’ve really pinned Jill’s murder on me? I mean, it’s all kind of circumstantial isn’t it?”

  “Sure it is. It’s an old trick with outfits like the one after you. If they’d have really wanted you out of the way they’d have killed you. This was just a ploy to buy them time. You would have been kept overnight, maybe a few days. In the end you would have been released.” He drove slowly through Kenilworth so as not to arouse any suspicion. Most of the houses were dark, but it was still a very exclusive sort of place and he knew from experience that some of the neighborhoods had their own security goons. “When you got out of jail, Shawna,” he continued, “the people who are doing this would be long gone and no trace would remain. The cops would have a lot of questions and so would you. But nothing else. A game, just a game.”

  “A game in which innocent people are murdered,” Shawna said. “That’s some game.”

  Harry slowed and turned into a private drive. He stopped before a gate set into a stone wall. There was a camera mounted there. Harry grinned into it. “Gabe! Open the hell up! I’ve got some hot women with me!”

  Shawna thought it would never work. Good God, it was five in the morning. Gabe Hebberman, the publishing magnate, would be sleeping. But a voice said, “All right, but don’t steal anything.”

  Harry drove slowly down a winding drive flanked by huge birch trees as the gate slid close behind them.

  The grounds of Gabe Hebberman’s estate were impressive. Shawna couldn’t see much of it in the dark, but what she could see—sprawling gardens, tennis courts, and what looked to be a riding stable in the distance—made her envious.

  She wondered if this Gabe was single.

  “He’s a widower,” Harry said, reading her mind. “And he’s still faithful to the memory of his wife.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Like hell you weren’t, Shawna. I could hear the gears turning over here.”

  She said nothing. Harry was way too intuitive for his own good. She would definitely have to watch herself around him. Already she owed him a lot and by the time this was over? She didn’t even want to think about it.

  CHICAGO SOUTHSIDE, HYDE PARK:

  UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICAL CENTER

  5:44 A.M.

  When Rick Perreau got back from break, he made for the lab to hurry along the blood toxicology on those gangbangers they’d brought in. It came back about how he’d figured—both of them were coked to the gills. It was a pretty common finding. Some people just thought they were ten feet tall and bullet-proof after a few rocks.

  When he got to the morgue, it seemed awfully quiet.

  It wasn’t exactly a lively place (no pun intended) on the best of days and at night it was downright... dare he think it... dead. But, still it had its own feel, its own sounds of occupancy: the noises of instruments being clattered into stainless steel pans, the buzz of saws, the clicking of computer keys as things were filed and processed.

  He heard none of these.

  “Wake up in there, Bridey,” he called out. “Not you, pal.”

  The body on the gurney slept quietly in its body bag. It paid the lab tech no mind.

  “Where’d you come from?” Rick asked.

  There was a large yellow envelope hooked to the foot of the gurney. Rick opened it and scanned the contents, shaking his head. He hated when they did this. The nurses would wheel a body in here and just leave it. No word, nothing. Just push it through the doors. Not their problem.

  The death certificate said the guy was eighty-eight years old. Heart disease.

  Rick set the toxicology reports on the gurney and pushed their newest occupant towards the freezer. “We’ll find a place for you, chum.”

  He had to go through the inter-connecting autopsy rooms to do so. He looked around for Bridey in the first two and saw nothing. Maybe she’d slipped out for a sandwich or something. No biggie. He made it into the third room when he stopped cold.

  He looked around quickly, suspecting a joke.

  “What the hell is this?” he said under his breath.

  There was a body on the table. It had been opened up... in fact, it had been sheared open. It didn’t look like the work of a scalpel as much as that of a chainsaw. But as he looked around, he saw the sternum sitting in a stainless steel specimen tray. The air was pungent with an acrid, burnt smell.

  What in the Christ?

  There was blood and slime greased over the floor. But no bodies. Instruments were scattered about. A cart was knocked over. There was a shoe laying in a puddle of blood. A man’s loafer. Bloody footprints led away into the freezer. There was a smeared trail following in their wake... as if something large had been dragged away.

  Rick stood there. A clot of grease had formed in his throat.

  You better get security. That’s what you should do.

  He turned and paused... waiting.

  He could hear something from the freezer. A wet, flabby sound. A sucking sound. Like a dry vac hose working a bucket of chum. He licked his lips and found himself staring at the shoe, the blood. Somehow, some way, they seemed to be the answer to everything. But he wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.

  “Bridey?” he said, very softly. “Dr. O’Donnel? Is that you?”

  Chewing his lip in indecision, he knew he had to go in there. If he went and got security, they’d wonder why he hadn’t followed the trail. Someone could’ve been dying in there. With the amount of blood, it would be the natural conclusion.

  All right, all right.

  He pushed through the door and had a look.

  Someone in an ensanguined lab coat was bending over a body. Despite the ruined, flayed features, he could see that it was Frank. And bending over him, Bridey. She was making a horrible sucking, gasping sound, her entire body shuddering with slow, rolling spasms.

  His stomach in his throat, Rick just stared.

  “Bridey,” he said in a controlled, monotone voice. “Bridey... are you...”

  She fell back against him and he had to hold her trembling weight in his arms. He liked the woman. He respected her. He looke
d forward to seeing her. To chatting and joking... but at that particular moment, he wanted to push her aside. She was cold in his arms. And wet. Her body had been slimed with some sticky, gelatinous ichor. The stink was unbearable. It reminded him of a beach strewn with rotting fish. It was that sort of smell: cold, brackish, decayed.

  “Bridey...”

  She brought her head up with a jerking motion. Her hair hung over her face in moist, knotted tendrils. It was clotted with blood and something oily and black. She brushed her hair aside. Her eyes were filled with blood, her cheeks painted with lurid streaks of red mucus.

  A bloated, blackened tongue rasped over her craggy lips.

  “NO! GET OFF ME! GET OFF ME!” Rick screamed madly, shrilly, his voice echoing in the confines of the freezer. His eyes darted wildly, swimming in his sockets. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME GODDAMMIT DON’T YOU TOUCH ME—”

  He tried to pull away, to fight, kick, claw, but she overwhelmed him with a savage, brutal strength, slamming him to the floor.

  Screaming and gagging, warm bile squirting into his mouth, he thrashed his head violently side to side. But it was no good. Bridey moved up and over him with a fluid, boneless grace, pinning him. Inches from his shrieking face, she opened her mouth wide and wider still. Her breath was like hot brine. Her tongue came out—at least what he thought was her tongue—licking and twisting in the air, impossibly white and glistening. It went into his mouth and down his throat, deeper, deeper, until he thought he’d burst.

  And the pain. Christ in Heaven, the pain.

  It radiated in white-hot waves from his belly, up, up into his head where it gathered in an explosion of agony that became a sweet, warm numbness. He drifted off with no worries.

  When he awoke, he would have a new set of priorities.

  MCLEAN, VA: PARKVIEW HILLS

  6:25 A.M.

  When you were the Director of National Intelligence and the phone started ringing off the hook before six, you knew you were in for another long day. Charles VanderMissen had slept little more than two hours when a call came through his secure line. He’d just gotten off the phone with the President and now here was more good news.

  “Yes?” he said, still wiping sleep from his eyes.

  “Chuck. It’s me.”

  It was Walter Sleshing, still in his office at the DIA keeping watch. He probably hadn’t slept more than a few hours since this entire ugly mess began. The old, tireless watchdog.

  “Tell me.”

  “We’ve had a confirmed incident in St. Louis. Dozens of witnesses. The lid’s off this damn thing,” Sleshing said in a pained voice as he reeled off the details of the St. Louis MetroLink train incident. “People are going to be asking a lot of uncomfortable questions. The media are already nosing around.”

  “It was only a matter of time.”

  In a way, VanderMissen was relieved. Questions would be asked, answers would have to be supplied. The blowback from this could be potentially damning. Now it would land squarely in the President’s lap. His advisors and cabinet—which included VanderMissen—would be expected to come up with something to either whitewash this or some creative misdirection to mislead the public. Deniability was a mantra when you were deep in the hotbed of DC politics.

  “Okay, Wally, send what you have into me and I’ll let the President know at the Daily Brief.”

  “Hang on, Chuck. Something just came in.”

  Oh, Christ.

  “Another possible in Chicago. U of C Medical Center. Not confirmed yet. Sounds probable, though.”

  “Shit. Okay.”

  When he got off the line, he checked the call logs of his secure sat phone and his personal cell. He had calls from Gus Costello and Arlene Rabin, the Secretaries of Defense and State respectively, but he’d already returned those. There was one from Admiral Paulus, the ONI director, another from Bob Pershing, and a raft of others ranging from Gordon Parks of the NSA to Charlie Goade of the FBI and even Colonel Donnelly from INSCOM, the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command. The latter was a nosy, jittery, downright paranoid career spook who spent a great deal of his resources spying on the CIA, DIA, Homeland Security, and any other intelligence and security services that crossed his radar.

  VanderMissen knew it was just the beginning. Calls and cables and emails would be flying in from every corner of the country and the world. And as Director of National Intelligence, it would be his job to answer them.

  All right then. Time to get the stove hot and see what they could cook up this time.

  RICHMOND, VIRGINIA:

  CBT BIOSAFETY LEVEL THREE:

  THE MIRROR MAZE, 7:35 A.M.

  "As you can see,” Dr. Evans said, peering out at Elizabeth Toma from the plastic bubble of his hood, “the behavior of the host is obvious if you know what to look for. What we have here are mice, but, behaviorally, there’s little difference between them and humans. Once parasitized, the host no longer exists as an independent entity. It is a slave of the parasite and lives only to propagate it and its spawn.”

  Standing there in her green biosuit, listening to the suction of filtered air and Evans’ droning voice, Elizabeth felt a curious combination of fatigue and claustrophobia. How Evans and his people spent hours upon hours in these confining suits and never went out of their minds was beyond her. Level Three wasn’t as bad as The Cage, Level Four, but it was hardly comforting. The corridors and rooms were made of special reflective glass, hence it was called The Mirror Maze.

  As Evans droned on, she watched the techs bustling about to and fro in their suits. Most of them were coming from the autopsy room carrying sample jars of blood and bile and spinal fluid, sectioned brainstems, intestines, and lymphatics. The parasites were amazingly prodigious, in that they mothered their eggs and hid them in the most unlikely places. Tissues would be cultured and sliced micron-thin for the electron microscope.

  “The eggs have a tendency to migrate,” Evans explained. “Which we find absolutely amazing. The survivability of these creatures is beyond anything we could have hoped for.”

  In one of the biology labs, he performed a simple experiment. It was meant, of course, to fill her with shock and awe and it did just that. He had two clear plastic biocontainment vessels that looked like small fish aquariums or the old glove box isolators they had used years before. In one, were six healthy white mice. They were confused, obviously, as to where they were. This was not their normal environment and they clustered together in fear. They would overcome it in time. If they lived that long which, of course, they wouldn’t.

  In the other plastic vessel were two mice that did not look healthy at all. Their eyes were dull, their bodies swollen, fur discolored with gray streaks. They laid on the bottom, twitching and trembling.

  “These are our vectors,” Evans explained, though that was obvious. “What I want to illustrate to you is how quickly the infected hosts will sense healthy animals.”

  Using remote manipulators, he prodded the infected mice. They barely responded. They looked, if anything, as if they were dead or near to it.

  “See how sick they are? One wouldn’t expect much of them. Even rising up and moving an inch or two would seem far beyond them…but watch as I introduce Group A to Group B.”

  Using the manipulators, he transferred the infected mice into the vessel with the healthy ones. The healthy group initially stayed away from them, cowering together in the corner. They were more agitated than they had been a few moments before. They sensed something was amiss. The infected mice were on the other side of the vessel. They merely trembled a bit.

  “Keep watching,” Evans told her, as if she was going to turn away.

  Approximately four minutes after Group A was placed in the vessel, the two infected mice began to thrash uncontrollably. They spit out blood as they writhed and squeaked. Then they were up. Slowly, painfully, they moved in the direction of the healthy mice who began to squeal and run about in circles. Their terror was obvious. One of the infected individua
ls leaped on a healthy mouse with startling speed. It pressed the healthy animal down, holding it, as it disgorged a larval worm from its mouth. The healthy animal fought, refusing to accept the parasite. Then something happened. It went limp. It became pacific, soporific even. It no longer moved. It acted as if it was drugged.

  “See? See?” Evans said, clearly excited. “The infected mouse has overcome the healthy specimen by secreting biochemically-specific pheromones which have triggered its brain to release a cocktail of endorphins. The healthy animal is quite literally stoned. Now it happily accepts parasitization.”

  A worm crawled into its mouth and the mouse seemed unaware of the fact. Now it was inside. The worm would not only use the host’s own body to protect it and nourish it, but it would appropriate the host’s genetic machinery to produce a comfortable ecosystem with the necessary proteins and chemicals that would help it grow as its host mothered it and quite literally destroyed itself in the process. Which it would do quite happily, stewed to the gills on the pharmacy of drugs its parasite forced it to manufacture. The host would become a zombie more or less with a single relentless drive: to not only protect its parasite but to become an incubator for thousands of eggs, to seed them to the world and infect thousands of new hosts.

  “A perfect lifeform,” Evans said, still clearly excited.

  Elizabeth figured it was about as close to an orgasm as the man got. Any normal person would find it sickening; he was thrilled, exhilarated, breathless over it.

  And what about you?

  This was what she kept asking herself. She had recognized something inside her that was completely alien—sympathy and a rising moral indignation that was not part and parcel of who and what she was. She did not like it. Such things could make you weak and she could not afford to be weak. Not now. Not at this stage. Not when ultimate, omnipotent power was within her grasp. She was surrounded by countless enemies. One sign of weakness would be her undoing. The Collective would not allow it; they would crush her.