Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  Shawna fed her card into the little slot and punched in her pin number. The computer screen wanted to know how much and from what account. She chose savings and punched in $900, which left her with like $20 in her account, enough to keep it open.

  Harry stood behind her, keeping an eye on the traffic. But no one seemed to be paying any attention.

  The ATM machine beeped and said: INVALID ACCOUNT.

  “Maybe you put in the wrong pin,” Harry suggested.

  She tried again. Same thing. She let Harry do it on the third try and again it was invalid. The machine promptly sucked her card in.

  “Shit,” she said. “I hate when that happens.”

  Harry was starting to feel a little nervous.

  Sure, it could’ve been a mistake... but what if it wasn’t?

  “It’s happened to me a bunch of times,” she reassured him. “It’s nothing.”

  “All right. But why don’t you just fill out a withdrawal slip inside and do it the old-fashioned way?”

  She chewed her lip indecisively. “Okay.”

  Her confidence was rattled a little now. Harry felt the same. But he was going in there with her. She seemed to think the people they were dealing with here didn’t have an extremely long reach. But she was wrong. He knew she was wrong. There wasn’t anything they couldn’t do.

  “Hello,” a woman with a CATHY name tag said. She was pleasant, perky, efficient.

  “I want to make a withdrawal,” Shawna told her, handing her the slip.

  “Certainly.” She started punching her keyboard.

  Harry looked around. He was as nervous as a kitten and he didn’t mind admitting it. Everyone he saw was one of them.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Cathy said, “but I can’t find a record of this account number.”

  Harry was starting to sweat now.

  “Try again,” Shawna snapped loud enough that people started looking.

  “Yes,” Cathy said. She punched her keyboard. “Sorry. Nothing.”

  Shawna shook her head. “This is crazy.” She gave the teller her checking account number.

  “Nothing on that either,” Cathy said. “I... I don’t know what to tell you. Did you recently close your accounts or transfer funds or—”

  “What do you think I am?” Shawna said. “A goddamn idiot?”

  “Easy,” Harry told her.

  “All right, all right. Then just look it up by my name. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cathy said, trying hard to keep that helpful, friendly smile on her face.

  “Geddes, Shawna Geddes. G-E-D-D-E-S.”

  One of the managers was keeping an eye on them now. Pretending not to and doing a very poor job of it.

  “Sorry, ma’am. Nothing on Shawna Geddes. I’m sorry. I—”

  Shawna sighed. “I’ve had accounts here since I was sixteen for chrissake. What the hell’s going on?”

  The manager started threading his way over.

  “Just a simple mistake, I’m sure,” Harry said, grabbing Shawna by the arm and dragging her to the door like a kid from a candy store.

  He shoved Shawna into the car.

  “Nice,” he said. “They’ll remember you for sure.”

  “When I start to freak out, Harry, I get pissy. I can’t help it.”

  He squealed out of the parking lot and merged in traffic. “I hate to say it, Shawna, but I think you’ve been erased.”

  LOUISVILLE, KY:

  SHAWNEE PARK 4:13 P.M.

  About 300 of them had gathered: a large, angry cluster of young men and women dressed in combat fatigues, leather vests, black jeans and T-shirts. Some proudly wore the black parade helmets of the German SS and others sported Waffen SS field caps. Gestating a thick, savage odor of hate and intolerance which was mother’s milk to them, they displayed their ultra-right wing philosophies on their skins: Swastikas. SS runes. HITLER WAS GOD, proclaimed biceps. HIMMLER FOREVER, said a heavily tattooed back. Etched into flesh were remarkable, artistic likenesses of the Fuhrer himself, Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler, Eva Braun. The skull and crossbones of the SS Totenkopf Division, the raised Z of the Polizei Division. The anarchic symbols of WAR (White Aryan Revolution), the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Nationalist Front. They marched in rowdy, bustling columns waving flags with the stars-and-stripes or the good old Union Jack formed into swastikas, hoisting banners proclaiming JESUS WAS WHITE, WHITE IS RIGHT, THE HOLOCAUST IS A MYTH, and ARBEIT MACHT FREI.

  As they marched and thronged, the anthems of the movement sung by such punk and metal bands as Belzec, Blitzkreig, and Das Reich blasted away. Groups of skinheads looking for a good fight chanted the words of “Aryan Exterminator” as performed by Stormtrooper:

  “THIS IS HOW IT GOES!

  THIS IS HOW IT ENDS!

  STAND UP MY ARYAN BROTHER!

  STAND UP FOR YOUR PURE-BLOODED MOTHER!

  THE NIGGERS ARE GONNA DIE!

  IMMIGRANTS ARE GONNA FRY!

  IS THERE ANYONE FUCKING CRAZY ENOUGH

  TO BELIEVE THE JEWISH LIE?

  SEIG HEIL WHITE BROTHER SEIG HEIL!”

  If there was anyone of non-white, non-European, non-Christian lineage in the park that morning, they were keeping a low profile. And that was probably for the best.

  On a raised platform, one man rose above the rest. He gave the crowd the stiff-armed Nazi salute and it was returned with a deafening chant of “SEIG HEIL! SEIG HEIL!” The man addressing the faithful was Robert Schlising, a computer programmer of German-American heritage from Trenton, New Jersey. He was something of a prophet to his people. His father had served in the German Army in World War II. Two of his uncles had fought with the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front against the Bolsheviks. And his Great Uncle Heinz had been the chauffeur of Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller for a short time. Later, Uncle Heinz had achieved a certain notoriety by proving himself quite efficient in bayoneting Jewish children during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But his true claim to fame was as an SS guard at the Chelmo extermination camp.

  Uncle Heinz was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 for war crimes

  Schlising held his hands high. “JEWISH LIES! COMMUNIST CONSPIRACIES! DEMOCRATIC IMPOTENCE! LIMP-WRISTED LIBERAL AGENDAS! WHERE WILL IT END?” he cried out. “MY FRIENDS, MY DEAR, DEAR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, I ASK YOU: WHERE WILL IT END? AS BLOOD CALLS TO BLOOD, I SAY TO YOU NOW—IT COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED! THE NEGROS COULD STILL BE SERVING THE WHITE MAN AS IS THEIR DESTINY! THE HISPANICS COULD STILL BE SQUATTING IN THE MEXICAN DESERT! THE JEWS COULD HAVE BEEN BUT A MEMORY! WE WERE WARNED BY A GREAT MAN THAT IF THESE SUBHUMAN ELEMENTS WERE NOT PURGED AND PURGED COMPLETELY THEY WOULD RISE UP AND BITE THE HAND OF THEIR WHITE MASTERS! HE WARNED US! ADOLF HITLER WARNED US THAT THE WHITE RACE WOULD BECOME A MINORITY! OVERRUN BY SUBHUMAN RACES THAT WOULD POLLUTE OUR BLOOD!”

  The crowd was driven into a near-religious fury.

  “WILL WE ALLOW IT? I SAY AGAIN: WILL WE ALLOW IT?”

  Schlising fanned the flames of hatred; something he was an expert at. He told the faithful to grind every non-white, every Jew, every immigrant under his or her heel for it was the right of the Aryan race to subjugate the “turd-skinned races.”

  The faithful, many with children learning the message, watched Schlising with wide eyes. They did not turn away. So they did not notice the other Skinheads who infiltrated their ranks. Did not see them slip in, insinuate themselves so easily, so effortlessly.

  Though they dressed the same, sported the same buttons and badges and tattoos and hairless skulls, they were very different. The advance guard of a truly new order. And they had come in force. Twenty men and woman all with that horrible dead look about them.

  They came on, their skins baggy like old suits, their faces waxen and sallow. They wore sunglasses as if the afternoon sun was too bright for them. They moved mechanically, lacking that certain muscular fluidity that defines human grace. They jerked. They twitched. They shambled. Insane marionettes controlled by the trembling fingers of puppet masters wired out on am
phetamines.

  No one noticed anything unusual.

  Save for the smell.

  A mephitic bouquet of sewers and backed-up drain pipes. Heavy, raw, almost sulfurous.

  “What the fuck is that stink?” Heddy Lister said to her sister Anna and her boyfriend Max. She wrinkled her nose, forgetting about Schlising and Hitler and the thousand-year reich. “Do you smell that?”

  Anna paid no attention, neither did Max.

  They’d both been drinking and coking for almost sixteen hours now. They saw nothing but Schlising and smelled nothing but the spilled blood of dark-skinned races.

  But somebody behind her said: “Fucking roadkill, man.”

  One of the new arrivals threaded through the crowd, bumping into people and leaving that awful stench in his wake. His face was beaded with sweat, his teeth chattering. He slammed into a woman who fell into Anna and Heddy dropped her beer.

  “Fucking prick,” the woman’s boyfriend snarled. “Do you want my boot upside your fucking head?”

  The skinhead laughed dryly and punched him in the face.

  And it wasn’t just here; the entire crowd was suddenly in disruption. The newcomer skinheads were hitting people, knocking people over, stomping them when they were down, spitting in people’s faces, and all in all spreading a wave of unrest, violence, and the ever-present odor of bad meat.

  “PLEASE! PLEASE! BROTHERS AND SISTERS, PLEASE!” Schlising shouted over the cacophony of angry, screaming voices. “WE MUST NOT FIGHT AMONGST OURSELVES! WE HAVE A COMMON ENEMY! A COMMON—”

  But he didn’t finish that as a beer bottle caught him in the head. He looked out at his flock, a thin trickle of blood coming from his cut ear. Though sixty years old, Schlising was a thick-necked bull of a man with a flashpoint temper that burned hotter than a firebrand. Clenching his teeth, he charged into the fray, fists lashing.

  Whatever unity had existed amongst this new, dangerous master race, had evaporated like dew under the glare of hate.

  Heddy pulled herself up and kicked some guy in the ribs until a fist crashed into her mouth. Her sister went down next to her, catching a knee in the face. Max punched, kicked, and head-butted anyone within range. Bodies were tumbling and falling, voices shouting and cursing and screaming. The very rage that was like a bond to these people exploded in shockwaves.

  And through it all, Heddy, blood running down her chin, saw what was really going on.

  Stoned, drunk, raging, she still saw it.

  She saw one skinhead grab a woman by the face and smash his forehead into hers continually until she went limp. And then...

  And then it came out of his mouth in a nightmarish, undulating ribbon: a worm as big around as a man’s arm. It whipped and coiled in the air, leaving an awful smear of gray slime on the woman’s face right before it dove between her lips.

  Heddy just sat there, staring, staring.

  What the fuck?

  She could see heaps of tangled bodies.

  And worms. Worms slithering amongst the thrashing limbs. Some were no bigger than grass snakes, others like bloated garden hoses whipping and winding and making a hideous mewing sound.

  She saw them slide down throats. Emerge from throats. Wind themselves around writhing victims like constrictors. Burst open with clotty torrents of pearl-white eggs. She saw one huge worm—too large for her enfeebled brain to accept—explode out of a man’s throat in a spray of blood and tissue (that neatly severed his head) and slam into another man, burrowing through his chest with the spinning motion of a drill bit, each bloated ropy segment quivering with life.

  And suddenly... silence.

  Yes, complete silence. Oh, in the distance she could hear the wail of police sirens. She knew that would happen. But all the combatants were quiet. Eerily so. Some were sprawled on their backs, others sitting up, still others on knees and elbows. But all of them—even those bleeding and broken—were absolutely quiet.

  For one rambling mad moment, there were the sounds of normalcy.

  Birds sang. Leaves fluttered in the breeze. A dog barked. A car squealed its tires. Heddy found herself pressing her eyelids shut. Finally, she had to open them.

  And madness, it seemed, bred madness.

  For the spirit of brotherly love had descended on this gathering. It was more than the fact that everyone was sitting around with that stupid, almost bovine look of absolute peace and serenity on their faces. It was a physical thing she could feel. Where the atmosphere moments before (and in fact ever since the unofficial gathering had taken place) had been charged with electric negativity... now it seemed harmonious.

  Everyone had been tranquilized. Pacified. Injected with a serenity that was somehow frightening.

  But it wasn’t brotherly love, she knew.

  It was the worms.

  Because now... Jesus Christ... now people were stroking the worms that fed from their mouths. They were waiting with their jaws open to accept them. Many were picking them up and feeding them between their lips. Some were dropping them into the mouths of lovers and friends in glistening loops.

  Heddy felt an odd fuzzy grayness wash over her mind like a storm cloud.

  She knew she had gone insane. Maybe it was all the acid. The mushrooms. Who could say? Too many years of purposely distorting reality and now it was permanently fucked-up. A hallucinogenic canvas of running colors and distorted imagery.

  And what really nailed that home was when she saw a little girl pick up a worm. The thing had to be four or five feet if it was an inch. It squirmed and pulsed in her hands, a ghastly, violent white, segmented like a bendy straw. The little girl just smiled at it and pressed it to her mother’s lips as if she were giving her a flower to kiss or a sweet to relish.

  Heddy didn’t buy it.

  She didn’t buy any of it.

  You got hit in the head too fucking hard, she thought. Your brains are scrambled and poached and fried and seasoned in too much fucking acid. Hah, hah, hah! My God, look at it! Look at them!

  But she wouldn’t.

  She pressed her face down between her trembling knees and vomited, trying to void all the black, twisting dementia.

  “Fucking bullshit,” she sobbed. “All bullshit...”

  She didn’t believe any of it until her sister brought the worm to her. Anna was smiling and her eyes were misty like exploded stars. Heddy looked down the undulating black sucking maw of the worm and a split second before she would have screamed... she felt better as waves of a sweet, debilitating scent flooded through her, making her feel calm and relaxed, plugged into something much bigger than herself, her eyes looking beyond the here and the now and into the forever after.

  She understood, knew the thing was in her brain, already had her wound up tight and happily so.

  She grinned and took the worm between her lips like a lover, sucking its phallic mass deep into her throat.

  CAMP PEARY, WILLIAMSBURG, VA:

  THE FARM, 6:09 P.M.

  DCI Robert Pershing rarely visited The Farm. Now and again, he would drop by, often unannounced, to get a look at the caliber of training going on. Located within the Camp Peary Military Reservation, The Farm was the home of the CIA’s elite Junior Officer Training Program. It was here that agents learned the basics of running clandestine operations in a twenty week paramilitary course.

  It was also a place the CIA SOG teams could practice their craft.

  SOG had originated in the Vietnam War where they operated under the whitewashed, politically correct name Studies and Observation Group. To outsiders, at any rate. To those inside or in the know, SOG meant Special Operations Group. SOG teams ran long-range reconnaissance missions deep into North Vietnam, as well as Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and even into mainland China. They executed quick commando-type raids in enemy territory such as the liberation of POW camps and the destruction of enemy base camps. They were also involved in sabotage, guerrilla operations, agent insertions, abductions, and the assassination of enemy officers and intelligence p
ersonnel. On more than one occasion, SOG teams had been formed into four-man hunter/killer squads who were tasked with the elimination of American deserters and traitors. Such activities were illegal, of course. But then no one suspected a harmless organization like the Studies and Observation Group.

  Pershing liked the SOG teams and the fact that they answered to no one but the Company itself. When he became Director of the CIA, he took it upon himself to expand SOG from a paramilitary force of few hundred men and women to a secret strike force of nearly a thousand.

  His own army of sorts.

  He could deploy SOG teams anywhere in the world within a few hours.

  It gave him a tremendous feeling of power.

  And the great thing about SOG operatives was that they did their jobs without question. If Pershing were to, say, order them to kill certain powerful political figures, they would.

  Today was a special day.

  Pershing had invited General Francis K. Mason, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as his guest.

  After a gourmet meal prepared by Pershing’s own staff, he took the General on a tour of the facilities. They watched the SOG operators conduct combat drills with live ammo. Watched them on the shooting range. Watched them stage kidnappings and assassinations, counterterrorist operations, and even take down an enemy camp.

  Mason was impressed. SOG did very well.

  “But how are they with the real thing?” he wanted to know.

  Pershing filled him in on classified details of operations in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

  “They cut their teeth in Vietnam,” Pershing told him. “They had an unprecedented kill ratio of 150 to one. And they haven’t lost their edge since. We give them the best of everything. We expect results and they deliver.”

  Mason nodded his thinning crop of white hair. He was watching troopers in black fatigues orchestrate a fast-rope helicopter assault on a two-story building. The helicopters—Blackhawks—came screaming over the horizon and hovered thirty or forty feet above the rooftop. Ropes were dropped and troopers slid down them and entered the building by crashing through skylights and blowing doors with small charges. The whole thing came down in just a few minutes.