by Tim Curran
And if they found out... they had to be removed, silenced. Their names would appear on the Disposition Matrix, the kill list of enemies of the United States.
When a project like BioGen, successful or unsuccessful, is completed, all loose ends have to be tied up. And in BioGen’s case where it was necessary to launch a major cleanup—the eradication of disease vectors to avoid a major infestation—then the cleaners themselves had to be sterilized at operations’ end.
There were special men for such tasks.
Spread on VanderMissen’s desk was the file of one such man.
Thomas Malcolm Quillan.
Tommy Quillan was an ex-British SAS terrorist hunter and contract mercenary recruited by CIA/SAC for their own wet work programs following 9/11. Though his specialty was bagging Middle Eastern extremists and disrupting their networks via assassination, sabotage, and ruthless subterfuge, the Company had sent him after enemy agents, drug kingpins, traitors, politicians and industrialists. He was a professional, an expert that left no loose ends dangling.
But VanderMissen did not like him.
Nobody really did.
Men like him were necessary, but no one wanted to admit that they paid the salary of psychotics like Tommy Quillan. Other cleaners, other assassins, very often had tenuous moral codes they would cling to like refusing to kill children, but not Quillan.
His motto was simple: Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere.
Though DCI Pershing would never admit it, Quillan was being brought in for a very select purpose: to sterilize the ERT cleanup crews following the eradication of disease vectors. When Quillan was finished, BioGen and everything to do with it would be a secret even the men in power would only whisper amongst themselves. Because if they started whispering it other places, then Tommy Quillan would find them. Somehow. Someway. He always did.
Tommy Quillan loved to kill.
Even when he wasn’t being paid, he was still killing, torturing and murdering for the love of it. He could have been arrested in two dozen countries for unsolved serial murders. None of which had anything to with politics or military intelligence. You might send him into country A to liquidate a terrorist cell, but chances were he’d do a few civilians out of amusement. That’s why, between important missions, he was kept in third world hellholes where he could kill at will.
And now, he was coming to the States.
There was no doubt in VanderMissen’s mind that Pershing would be using him for damage control, to eliminate any tongues that might wag, but did it end there? He wasn’t so sure. He had the most awful feeling that Pershing was up to something, taking advantage of an ugly situation, and to those ends he was unleashing a monster.
LOUISVILLE, KY: UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
9:19 P.M.
The Biological Containment Team came through the fire door into the quarantine ward and it was worse than they thought. One of the infected was waiting for them, a bald dude whose face was so white that his pink-hued eyes looked like blazing rubies in comparison. Compton thought he had vomited out his intestines because there was a slimy white cord hanging from his mouth only it was a worm and it was twitching, coiling obscenely. The guy held its segmented length in his hands like a pet snake.
He was petting it.
“Do it!” came a voice over Compton’s helmet intercom. “Burn him! C’MON, COMPTON! DO IT!”
Compton stood there as the guy, quite casually, walked over to him. The other members of the BCT—Tanney, Barks, Quinn—bunched together nervously while Captain McCardle screamed at Compton.
Shit.
“BURN HIM!”
Swallowing, Compton squeezed the trigger on his flamethrower and a tongue of fire shot out, engulfing the man and his parasite. He thrashed around, slammed into the wall, and hit the floor with very little ceremony where he continued to burn and pop, letting off acrid plumes of black smoke.
There were bodies everywhere: the skinheads, the CDC/DHS team that had come to take them away, hospital workers. They were piled together in the corridor, all tangled together in a loose-limbed heap like mating spiders. Some of them were dead, torn wide open by their parasites, others were not—eyes glazed, faces bleached, but moving…sliding around in a great fleshy reptilian mass, the dead ones carried along with them.
“What the hell are they doing?” Quinn asked.
Good question, but nobody wanted to field it.
Nobody except old hardass Captain McCardle. He waltzed right over there, absolutely fearless, grabbed some woman by the ankle and dragged her from the heap. She separated from the others with a loud, wet smacking sort of sound as if she was suctioned to them. And maybe she was at that because long snotty streamers of some transparent material attached her to the mass.
McCardle dragged her about four feet.
She did not fight against him or even seem to know that he was there. When he released her, she crawled right back, making some weird sort of cooing sound that went right up Compton’s spine.
“Clusterfuck,” McCardle said.
Compton and the others kept their distance.
Even with his protective helmet on, the assorted air filters that kept out the bad stuff, he could still smell the burning body. Worse than that, he could smell those tangling, writhing bodies that stank of piss and shit, blood and vomit, and something worse like grapes fermented not to wine but a rotten, sharp-smelling mush.
“Let’s get this done,” McCardle said.
The BCT inched forward.
They hadn’t made it ten feet into the corridor, carefully edging towards the bodies, when something came looping down at them from above. It made a wet rubbery sound and slapped against Tanney’s helmet…its hooks scraping against the faceshield. He let out a choking, guttural bark and went on his ass.
Barks knocked the questing worm aside and promptly tripped over Tanney, something which would have been most comical at any other time and in any other situation.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY!” McCardle snapped, elbowing Compton aside.
Quinn opened up, casting fire in every which direction. It hit the walls, the floor, rose up in billowing flames and churning clouds of smoke. Whether he got the worm or not was anyone’s guess and it didn’t honestly matter because at that very moment the worms were everywhere—they were hanging from the ceiling like gauzy ribbons of mist, erupting from the bodies like missiles from silos, squirming on the floor in tangled networks like tree roots.
Suddenly, they were everywhere.
Massing.
Slithering.
Compton heard a voice in his head say, this is where things go from bad to worse, as he backpedaled, trying to avoid the flames, the mass of bodies that were moving with rhythmic pulsations, the reaching convolutions of parasitic worms. Many were small, no more than a few feet in length, and some considerably smaller, but others were gargantuan—eight, ten, and fifteen feet at least—inching forward like caterpillars, a clear slime draining from their pulsing white segments, hooks scraping on the tiles. They had head-like bulbs ringed by trembling stinging spines the size of pencils. The bulbs opened to reveal candy-pink mouthparts and great hooklike teeth that were meant to grab and never let go.
One of them dropped from the ceiling, winding itself around Quinn’s helmet like some massive undulating earthworm, its mouth fixing itself to his face shield, suckering itself there with a moist sound like a slobbering kiss. He tried to knock it free but it clung tenaciously as he stumbled around. It kept searching for a point of entry, detaching its mouth and suckering to new spots on the face shield. Over the helmet intercoms, they could all hear him screaming, crying out for help.
McCardle torched three or four worms crawling in his direction and then took hold of the pulsating worm on Quinn’s helmet with his gloved hands. Its flesh was unbelievably slippery like petroleum jelly and he couldn’t seem to get a grip. When he succeeded in seizing on a segment and began pulling on it, its hooks tore great gaping holes in Quinn’s biohazard suit. The se
gments bulged, swelling like straining musculature…and then the thing burst, literally exploding with a great gush of slime and gray ooze, hundreds of glistening pearl-white orbs that must have been eggs.
Another worm made a mewling sort of cry that was dry and screeching and enraged-sounding.
Compton burned five or six of them moving in his direction and then a shadow fell across his face shield as one of them dropped on him. He fought wildly with it, gripping its looping form in his gloved fists as it squealed and whipped, a boneless slithery thing that was almost impossible to get a hold of.
Its smell came through his air filter—hot and feverish like green meat and spilled blood, sharp and evil. As he wrestled with it, that stench seem to fill his head, making his stomach roll, making him gag…and then, it shifted. It was not rot and soft decaying things, but a cloying sweetness that nearly drove him to his knees. For one insane moment it reminded him of Halloween…of buckets of candy corn and caramel apples cooling on wax paper.
Then something hit him.
Knocked him into the wall and the worm hit the floor.
It was Tanney fighting with a parasite that had wound him up like a python with its prey.
Compton saw his own worm attempting to investigate his boot and he stomped on it, smashed it to steaming eggs and pulp as it squirmed at his feet.
It was absolute pandemonium now.
Tanney was losing the battle against the worm that was constricting him and Quinn was on the floor, his entire body shuddering as a worm slipped through the rents in his suit like a snaking white cable and disappeared inside him. Blood blossomed from the entry wound, bubbling from a tear in the suit…and then Quinn was no longer fighting.
Not that McCardle saw any of that.
He was too busy torching the body heap. He had turned it into a great blazing pyre whose flames licked the walls and ceiling. The bodies—those still living—rose up in the bonfire, swaying and screaming, jumping and contorting as if they were being electrocuted.
Barks torched Quinn, then fried a few worms on the ceiling as the sprinkler system rained down water on them.
“BACKUP!” McCardle was shouting into his headset. “WE NEED FUCKING BACKUP IN HERE!”
Compton tried to assist Tanney, but one good sweep of the worm’s body—or tail—and he was knocked away, right into the fire. He threw himself free, his suit scorched, crawling on his hands and knees. He looked up just in time to see a worm swinging above him like a rope on a gallows.
He rolled to the side as it dropped.
When it tried to strike at him, he kicked it into the fire where it twisted and flopped, snapping like a bullwhip.
“GET IT OFF ME!” Tanney was crying over the headset. “SOMEBODY GET THIS FUCKING THING OFF ME!”
Which McCardle was trying to do…but then the mother of all worms came slithering out of the smoke and haze and spraying water. It was white and segmented like the others, but it had to have been bigger around than a man’s thigh, not flattened like the others, but swollen, distended, each segment fat and heaving and perfectly round. It was thick-bodied and slug-like as it bore down on him, the spines on its bulb head twitching like fingers. It struck him and he hit the wall, then the floor. He let out a weird, almost babyish squeak as the thing covered him in its bulk, its mouth opening wider and wider as it struck, the hook teeth seizing his helmet.
But he fought.
Nobody could take that away from him.
Right to the end, he fought and clawed and snarled like a tomcat as the thing flattened him with its weight and its mouth began to crush his helmet. The hissing/sucking sounds it made were hideous. And that’s when Compton knew that it wasn’t crushing the helmet—it was putting out an almost unbelievable vacuuming suction that was causing the helmet to collapse, to implode, to smash McCardle’s head to sauce.
And just before that happened, McCardle got his knife off his belt and slit the worm open until it buried him alive in a surging river of gray jelly.
And about then, the helmet collapsed, spewing out pink and red goo.
In the meantime, Barks’ own suit was ripped open by the hooking appendages of a great worm as it encircled him in its fifteen foot length of throbbing segments. In his mind, his broken raging mind, it was not a worm that he fought with but some monstrous jungle serpent like the kind that always showed up in those comic books he read as a kid. He did not see the suckering invertebrate mouth of a worm suctioned to his face shield, but the fanged jaws and forking tongue of a snake. It wanted to break through the Plexiglas bubble, it wanted to spit poison in his eyes and sink its fangs into his cheeks, injecting venom that would turn his face to a suppurating mush that would be as soft and rancid as a brown apple.
But like McCardle, he did not give in.
He gripped the worm, fighting against its natural oily secretions of slime and digging his fingers into it until he felt them pierce its shivering, globby flesh, sinking deeper and deeper until the thing came apart in a slushy discharge, but still its mouth would not release the face shield.
Covered in slime, burnt, three or four worms hanging off him, Compton crawled to the fire door in time to greet the backup team…who put him down with a volley of bullets.
CHICAGO: KENILWORTH
10:14 P.M.
Dark. It was time to move. As Harry stood outside by the rental car Gabe had gotten them, waiting for Shawna, he felt like dozens of eyes were upon him, watching him, studying him, plotting out his every move. It was paranoia and he knew it, but he’d been in situations like this before where he’d made enemies of powerful people that wanted him to disappear. Although it was not a particularly warm night, he was sweating. He could feel the wetness in his armpits and up his spine. His stomach was rolling over itself, the back of his neck prickling. Fear. The fear of the hunted and he’d felt it before, but this time it was somewhat elevated.
Shawna came out of the house. Her eyes shined brightly in the darkness. She had said little after he explained earlier how it worked, that they were dead now, that Harry and Shawna as such no longer existed. It was the only way they could stay alive, by forgetting who they were and who they had been. At least, for the time.
“Are you ready?”
Her eyes did not blink. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“No, I’m not. And you know the reason for that, don’t you?”
She did. It seemed like excessive cloak-and-dagger to her, but Harry had instructed her that starting right now, until they were in an absolutely safe location, they would never mention where they were going or who they were going to see in case they were being eavesdropped on by listening devices.
“Bugs, Harry?” she had said. “Oh, really. Isn’t that a little dramatic?”
“You are now in the game, my dear. A wanted person. Welcome to the world of high drama.”
They got in the car and Gabe did not see them off. He had given them money and everything they’d need to go underground for a while. He would continue nosing about unofficially using his contacts, but they would probably never come face to face with him again until this blew over.
As he sat behind the wheel of the little nondescript Toyota Camry, Harry felt himself tense up. He remembered a skinny kid named Harold in baggy pants and a threadbare shirt with moist dishrags for hands that had won an essay contest in the fifth grade—America and What it Means to Me—and had to stand on the stage at St. Katherine’s beneath the lights while the award was handed to him. That kid had been filled with butterflies and hope. The nuns had beamed down at him. Father McKay kept patting Harold on the back. And out in the audience, Harold’s peers, all the other scruffy Catholic school kids he had beaten out for the $100 prize were eyeing him with contempt. Not all of them. Most would take it with grace, Harold had known, but others would hate. And some—the older kids, the dirt mean ones—would see it as a good reason to torment him on a daily basis. They didn’t realize that he’d never see a red cent of that $100. That H
arold’s old man would drink and gamble most of it away and if his mother intervened she’d get the strap. They didn’t know that he lived not only in fear of the strap and his old man’s violent outbursts, but of the rats that came out of the walls at nights and bit his toes. And as Harry remembered all that, he was amazed that as kid, writing had gotten him in nearly as much trouble as it did when he was an adult.
“Harry,” Shawna said. “Are we going to sit here all night?”
“Of course not.”
He pulled away and down the long drive, feeling her eyes on him all the while. He couldn’t meet them. He did not want to accept the bright fear in them because he knew it was in his own eyes as well. Shawna was terrified and he could not let her know he was, too.
“When will I find out where we’re going?”
“When we get there, my love.”
She sighed. He could feel her in the seat next to him—tense, trembling, gnawing on a knuckle. As they passed through the gates he reached over and grabbed her by the neck and, before she could stop him, he forced her face down in his lap.
“What the hell are you doing?” she said, fighting to pull her head away.
“Just relax. It’s better if only one person is seen driving away,” he told her.
“It’s dark out,” she said and he could feel her hot breath at his groin and forced himself not to let it arouse him.
“The people were dealing with have night vision devices, dear,” he explained to her. “Now stay down there for a while.”
She sighed again.
“Don’t worry. If you get bored down there, I’ll find something for you to do.”
Shawna bit him in the leg none too lightly.
CHICAGO: EN ROUTE
10:34 P.M.
"Kansas City, Kansas City, this is Romeo-Three. Do you copy?”
“Five-by-five, Romeo. We have you on the grid.”
“Subject Hotel November is leaving the residence.”
“Roger that, Romeo.”
“Hotel moving south on Green Bay. I’ll keep you advised.”