by Tim Curran
Do it! Do not hesitate!
Rabbanā Aşrif `Annā `Adhāba Jahannama 'Inna `Adhābahā Kāna Gharāmāan!
Her mouth filling with hematoseptic drainage, the world around her spinning, every cell in her body seeming to implode in a blazing death fury, she reached into the medicine cabinet as the mother worm tried to kick her legs out from beneath her. It constricted her throat, it sealed off her lungs, it forced her mind into the darkness. But battle was joined for possession of the husk the woman knew as her body and the worm knew merely as a vessel. NO!NO!NO!NO!NO!IWILLNOT RELENT I I I I WILL NOT!
Then it robbed her of her sight, but it was too late because her fingers held the syringe and she cried out through a mouth filled with blood, “God is good… God is great…” And she jabbed the syringe into her throat and pushed the plunger. Death came and she welcomed it, together they became one as she fell to the floor, gagging out a pink-yellow foam. The strychnine tore through her insides like a buzzsaw and her head fell against the toilet as gouts of blackening blood poured from her mouth and nostrils.
The host was dead.
The worm knew it could not repair it, so it forced itself from the woman’s mouth, all four feet of it, with a surging undulation, sliding right into the toilet. It slid down deep into the bowels of the building’s wastewater system where it bathed itself in filth and excrement, an environment it could thrive in. Then it began to explore this new system, looking for a host.
CHICAGO: CHINATOWN
2:45 P.M.
Sprawled on the bed, Harry Niles rolled his eyes back in his head as Shawna rode him at first softly and delicately, then picking up the rhythm, pumping her thighs and forcing him deeper and deeper inside her as her breath came in short, sharp gasps and he could feel the tension in his groin mounting, thickening, reaching for release… then she slowed it down again, toying, teasing, playing with him. Her hair hanging in her face, her breasts beaded with a dew of sweet sweat, she lowered herself down on him with easy, relaxed thrusts, riding his inches with a hot-breathed, barely concealed hunger.
She knew he was close, just as she was close.
But she would not allow it.
Not yet.
She pushed herself down on him slowly, barely even moving, letting gravity pull her down bit by bit. She was shaking, shuddering, feeling the heat in her loins spreading up into her belly and then into her chest.
She grasped his head and pulled his mouth to her breasts. “Please, Harry,” she said. “Oh God… please…”
He mouthed her nipples, licking them, sucking them between his lips, then releasing them, sucking them and releasing them, until they stood hard as they pressed into his face. He toyed with her like she toyed with him until she was shaking and gasping anew, then he took one pert breast into his mouth, then another. Shawna could stand it no longer, crying out, she pressed him down on the bed and pumped at him savagely, her thighs slapping against his own and she let out an exhilarated moaning as she found her orgasm and rode its wave, her body jerking and shuddering with release.
And Harry did the same, gripping the cheeks of her ass in his hands and forcing her down, burying himself in her until he came. And when it was over, they collapsed into a womb of heat and exhaustion.
“Don’t think… don’t think,” Shawna gasped, barely able to catch her breath, “that… it’ll happen… again…”
“Of course not,” he sighed. “Just because I let you use me once… doesn’t mean you can have your way twice.”
She uttered a low laugh and rested her head on his chest, her hair splayed over him. He held her to him, skin against skin, and wondered where it had all come from. They were on the bed talking, then she kissed him. Then… well, things had escalated. As he held her, running a hand down her smooth back, he knew he couldn’t let himself feel too deeply for her. She was a friend and he’d always felt protective of her, but he had to keep in mind who she was.
At least, that’s what he told himself.
But in reality, he’d already fallen from his lofty perch and belonged to her and he only prayed that she would not hurt him in the end.
“I want to see my mother,” she suddenly said. “If something happens, I want to see her one last time.”
“Nothing’s going to happen. Not if we’re careful.”
“I need to see her.”
Knowing it was an absolutely dangerous idea, he said, “If you want to see her then we’ll make sure you do.”
She hesitated a moment, then said, “You mean that?”
“Yes.”
“But the danger… what if they’re watching…”
“You let me worry about that,” he told her. “Now shut your mouth and press yourself against me. I need to enjoy this, my little dumpling.”
“Oh, shut up, asshole,” she said, pressing herself against him with a giggle.
HAMMOND, INDIANA:
FOREST-IVANHOE, 3:22 P.M.
It had been eating away at her all day and by late afternoon, Claire just couldn’t take it anymore. She was not only ready to come out of her skin, she wanted to hang it on the wall and call it a day. It wasn’t bad enough what was going on in the country with all this crazy talk about martial law and Army troops in the streets, some kind of awful terrorist attack involving parasites, but then there was George. George was off from the university with his bad knee and all he did all day was sit in the chair (which was fine, rest up) and watch the news, hour after hour (which was not so fine.) Never had Claire known him to take such an interest in current events.
“But it’s different now,” he told her for maybe the second, third, or fourth time. “It’s all different now.”
“Yes, I know that, George. I’m not stupid. Everything’s changed.”
After that, of course, he went right back to his brooding—something he was getting very practiced at by that point. And what could Claire really say? Was there any point in telling him that she was terrified? That the country was coming apart at the seams? That everything she’d ever known or cared for seemed like it was about to split the seams of its proverbial pants?
No, there was no point. Absolutely no point.
He had always been very, very stoic about things. Even the worst situations he took in stride…but this was eating at him in ways that simply seemed out of character. So finally, after he’d brooded all day, pretending he was worried like everyone else, she sat down by him and waited.
Finally, he looked away from CNN and said, “What?”
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”
“You know what’s bothering me. Same thing that’s bothering everyone else.”
But her intuition told her differently. “It’s something else. Something about all this you’re taking very personally. Now I want to know what.”
It looked like he was going to dismiss it all, but he didn’t. He swallowed. His eyes got very wet. His lower lip trembled. “We started this,” he said.
“Who?”
“We did. The parasite. I know what it is, you see, and I know where it came from.”
He told her when he’d worked for the government it wasn’t just for the FDA like he’d always said. Sure, maybe his checks came from the FDA but he actually worked for the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology in R and D. “I was part of a shadow group called S5. We developed biological weapons, Claire. And the team I was on, we developed a particular type of bioweapon by genetically enhancing the human tapeworm. It was called Project Biogenesis.”
She wanted to laugh at him. You, George Canning, worked in a top secret CIA lab? The idea seemed preposterous. It was far too James Bond for her husband who was a sweet, kind little man. A biology professor at Purdue University. Yes, he had been involved in research for many years when they lived out east, but he’d always told her it had something to do with diseases of livestock. It was very boring. And now he was saying it was biological weapons? Tapeworms?
“George, really…”
“I’m serious, Claire. It was classified research. I had to sign the Official Secrets Act. I had to tell you I worked for the FDA. That was the front. We all worked for the FDA.”
It made Claire feel very dirty somehow. Like the man she’d shared a bed with all these years was a stranger that had been playing around behind her back. It wasn’t anything like that, of course, and national security was national security… but bioweapons?
George?
It was devastating. Like learning that Bozo the Clown was a pedophile or Mister Rogers was a serial rapist. But she knew she couldn’t look at it that way even if it did feel like their husband-wife trust had been somehow violated. “And… and what you created, those awful worms… they’re loose?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t know for sure.”
“Yes, I can. This morning before you were awake, I got a call from Charles Durlain.”
“Charlie… you worked with him at the… the FDA.”
“He was a senior biogeneticist on the project.”
“He said these things are loose?”
George nodded. “You see, we developed them and afterwards the rest of us were shuttled off to other projects. But Charlie was involved from beginning to end. He told me what I never knew: they tested the weapon in Iraq five years ago. Somehow, he figures, our troops got infected. They brought it back with them.”
“Good Lord, George, that’s… that’s—”
Then the doorbell rang. Claire was glad of the interruption. Glad she didn’t have the time to speak her mind because it would have been ugly and hurtful. She had a very clear opinion on things like germ warfare and the like. The development of weapons that could not be contained and caused unbelievable suffering.
She answered the door and found a man in a NIPSCO uniform standing there. He tipped his hat to her. “Afternoon, ma’am,” he said in a fine Midwestern accent that was as pure as Indiana wheat under a high sun. “I’ve been going up and down the street checking natural gas lines. We’re trying to trace the source of a leak.” He flipped a few pages on his clipboard. “We show you as having a gas water heater. I need to check the feed. Won’t take but a minute.”
Claire sighed. Now? She wasn’t in the mood for it.
“It could be serious, ma’am,” he said, smiling brightly.
And for a moment there, Claire nearly stepped back and away. There was something about that smile and his flat dark eyes that did not belong. She shrugged it off and said, “Come in.”
He followed her, a stocky man with a hard jaw and a flattened nose like an old-time fighter.
“George… the natural gas people have come to check the lines.”
George mumbled something, fixated on CNN and the rioting in Los Angeles.
Claire led the gas guy down into the basement, over into the corner where the water heater was. He examined the feed line coming in, scribbled stuff on his clipboard. He pulled a wrench out of his bag and checked the fittings. With his sleeves rolled up, Claire saw that he had tattoos. On his left forearm there was a dragon and on the right some sort of bird of prey.
He took a meter from his bag. “Ma’am, would you mind turning off that valve down by the floor.”
He pointed to a line leading into the water heater. She crouched down, switched it off. She thought it was a water line, but then what did she know about these things?
“Just wait a sec there, ma’am,” the gas guy said. “Keep it off. I don’t want to get a false positive. Gotta make sure everything’s on the up-and-up.”
Crouched down, Claire waited, her back to him.
She heard him dig in his bag. “Okay,” he said. “That’s lovely.”
Claire felt a chill go right up her spine. His accent wasn’t Midwestern USA now… it was English. She turned and looked at him. He had a gun in his hand. There was a long black silencer threaded onto the end of it.
“No, wait…”
But he didn’t wait. He put two in her head, spraying blood and brain matter over the white face of the water heater. She laid there, dark fluid seeping from her ruined skull.
The gas man went upstairs.
He was whistling.
He walked up behind George’s chair.
George turned and looked at him.
“We might not have found you if Charles Durlain hadn’t rung you up,” said the gasman.
“BioGenesis,” George said, a whimpering breaking loose in his throat.
“That’s right, mate. Nothing personal.”
Two more in the head for George and that was it.
Tommy Quillan broke down his weapon and tucked it safely in his bag. When he got out to the van, he scratched another name off his list.
NEW YORK CITY, EAST BRONX:
PELHAM PARKWAY, 3:47 P.M.
Virginia Astato got a front-row view of the action down on the street from her third-floor apartment window and it was better than anything on TV. You couldn’t get this kind of action on Dancing with the Stars or 16 and Pregnant. This was the real juice, man, this was the shit, and it was free, honest-to-God free.
“Hey, Virge,” Joey said, “maybe you ought to get away from there, eh? All it takes is one stray bullet and I’ll be vacuuming your teeth out of the rug.”
“Don’t worry about it. Go back to your fights.”
“Don’t worry about it, she says. Like it’s nothing.”
“Oh, shut up, Joey.”
“You gotta think of the baby.”
She patted her round belly, all seven months of it. “Baby’s fine. Now go back to your crap on TV.”
“Crap, she calls it.”
Virginia ignored him. Let him grumble. Let him groan. This was history in the making and she wasn’t about to miss it.
“Ahhhh, whatever,” Joey said, watching the UFC on the tube, totally oblivious to the rioting in the streets below. “Come on, Shane! Pound that fucker! Put him in the fucking morgue! Work him! Work him! Watch that left! SHEEEEEIIIT! That’s the stuff!”
Virginia shook her head, watching the action below.
Two or three dozen men were mixing it up with the National Guard and some of the boys from the 49th Precinct. The men were throwing rocks at a couple APCs rolling down the street and over a bullhorn the cops were telling everyone to disband and go back to their homes.
Jesus, it looked like a scene from Palestine or Northern Ireland or one of those godawful places. Who’d think you could see this kind of stuff here in the Bronx?
The men were not disbanding.
They were lighting up Molotov cocktails and throwing them at the vehicles. Clouds of fire burst over the faces of the vehicles and the guy on the bullhorn was getting increasingly pissed off, telling them it was their last chance and their last warning.
A gunner in one of the APCs fired a few rounds over their heads from a mounted machine gun.
“Joey! Get over here! You gotta see this shit!”
“Hey, what? I’m doing nothing over here? I’m trying to watch the fights… hoo, shit, watchit, Shane! That’s it! Drill him! Drill him! Bust his fucking teeth out!”
Virginia sighed. What an idiot.
The baby kicked, feeling her excitement and awe.
Now a couple of police cars came tearing up the street followed by a gray tactical van. The van squealed to a halt and two dozen cops in full riot gear pressed in, pushing the men back and scattering them. These guys weren’t fucking around. Those that didn’t move fast enough, the cops beat to the ground. More Molotovs were launched.
Five, six, seven of them.
The cordon of fire made the riot cops pull back and the men surged forward to reclaim their wounded and then the APCs opened up and cut down nearly half of the men in a single sweep. The others tried to run and they were cut down, too.
The cops were calling out over their bullhorns.
There were bodies in the street, pools of blood. Men screaming. Shattered glass and bullet-pocked cars at the curbs. Virginia just watched i
t with her jaw hanging open.
Joey came running over. “Hell’s going on down there?”
“I told you! There’s a fucking riot!”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?”
GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP:
SHATI REFUGEE CAMP
10:58 P.M. PALESTINE TIME
By pale moonlight, the Israeli Defense Forces moved in. Although it was technically a biocontainment operation, to those who watched from ruined buildings and behind heaps of rubble it was a military strike: trucks and armored vehicles, ground troops charging forward, helicopter gunships circling overhead. And lights, lots of lights. Because the refugee camps were nothing if not dark as the pit by night.
So the IDF moved in.
Down narrow snaking streets crowded with cinder-block houses and the rubble of neighborhoods blasted to wreckage, around the hulking debris of makeshift buildings that had been leveled by F-16 strikes, cutting down alleyways deep with refuse and trash and skittering rats. The flat, bullet-scarred faces of buildings and bomb-cratered streets were testament to the bloody clashes between Hamas and the Fatah and the intervention of the IDF. Open walls were crowded with the graffiti of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and peeling posters of suicide bombers, all glorifying the death of innocents.
The IDF soldiers wore bright orange biocon suits and carried IMI Tavor assault rifles which had now replaced the Uzi in the Israeli arsenal. Every third man had a flamethrower.
Cautiously, they moved deeper into the maze of the camp.
The lights behind them—headlights and spots, parabolic reflectors and beam projectors—turned night into a very surreal, shadow-crawling sort of twilight. Shapes were in constant motion. Everything was gliding, stealthy, and threatening. The carcass of a rusted minibus was a looming threat. Heaped bricks were enemy combatants.