Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  “To the Warehouse.” He explained all that to her and she knew the place. “I’m sure he’s with the Old Man now.”

  “What will they do to him?”

  He shrugged. “They could kill him. They might just lock him away until this is over then let him go. Then again…”

  “What?”

  “There’s always personality reassignment.”

  Her eyes widened. “And what is that?”

  “Brainwashing.” He gave her the gist of a place called The Resort. What went on there. “If they do that, he’s lost to you. He might as well be dead. They’ll program him with a new life, a past history, likes and dislikes, fears and desires…everything.”

  “Is it that complete?”

  He looked at her. “Shawna, when they’re done even your own mother will have no memory of you. It’s like the ultimate witness protection program.”

  “Then we have to go get him out.”

  He laughed. “Really? Just you and me?” He shook his head. “Not possible. They have security everywhere. They’d kill us.”

  “Then what?”

  “Sorry to tell you, but nothing. We can’t help him. You seem to think he’s pretty smart, pretty crafty. Okay. That’s good. Because if he’s going to get out of there with his life and his mind intact, he’ll need every bit of that because it’s all in his hands now and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

  CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI

  POLE CREEK ROAD, 8:13 P.M

  There was one thing for sure that everyone knew: Elmer Cassling hated children. He hated the sound of their voices, their laughter, their joy, their exuberance. But mostly, he hated their youth because at 63 years of age, his own was quickly abandoning him. And this was why he put up with zero shit from them. Whenever he caught them around the campground, he chased them off. He went out of his way to make it hard for them to enjoy themselves on his watch. The way he saw it, he was the manager and that was his job.

  So that evening, when he heard the sound of their squealing voices, he saw red.

  Goddamn them!

  He knew right away it was probably the Bohannon kids or the Galligan twins from the farms up the road. They were usually the ones he had trouble with. They were thick as thieves. A rat pack of monsters that would become meth-heads and crack dealers given time. Their parents didn’t give a shit, they were drunk and useless (Ritchie Bohannon), welfare cases (Rip Galligan), or whores (Kathy Bohannon). It was pointless to appeal to such people to keep their shitting brats in sight because the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.

  Oh, Elmer had tried. After all the stop signs had been stolen from the campground, he’d gone straight over to the Bohannon place and confronted Kathy Bohannon (he made sure Ritchie wasn’t there because he was one violent SOB). She had answered the door in a pair of shorts so tight her gee-gee was sticking out like a hungry clam, her nipples trying to poke through her t-shirt. She had refused to listen to him because her kids were not criminals.

  This was the last straw.

  This time he was going to straighten them out the way their parents should have. The campground was privately-owned and they had no business hanging around, vandalizing things and raising hell. Elmer only needed to catch them in the act just the once, then he’d have something for the sheriff.

  Nan, his wife, always told him to go easy because they were just kids. That’s all, just kids doing what kids do. But she couldn’t know. She couldn’t understand that on some level, Elmer was certain that they played these pranks and fooled around just to belittle him and make him look ineffective at his job.

  All the hooting and hollering was coming from the woods, the restricted area of the woods. This was the place where campers were not encouraged to go because it was where the sewage lagoon was located, the pit where the campground waste was collected and broken down naturally by bacterial action and evaporated by the wind and sun.

  They wouldn’t be there!

  Who in the Christ would play around the shit pit? Even those goddamned inbred, dumb-assed Galligans and Bohannons would know better than that. At least, Elmer hoped so. The lagoon was fenced off, but he wouldn’t put it past them to scale the fence so they could get near the sewage. It was only three feet deep, but it was dangerous. You could easily be overcome by the fumes and—

  It took about twenty minutes to reach the lagoon if you followed the meandering path through the woods, but if you cut straight through, you could make it in five if you knew the way. Elmer charged through the brush, sticks scratching his hands and face, pickers sticking to his pants, mossy logs trying to trip him up. Little bastards! God, when I get my hands on them! Evil monsters are probably throwing puppies into the shit pit! By the time he reached the clear cut where the lagoon was located, he was bleeding and red-faced, ticks on his arms and skeeter bites dotting his neck and forehead.

  There was a wide grassy verge around the lagoon fence so that the wind would not be impeded by heavy growth. He saw right away that the gate was wide open, something which was impossible because he kept it locked. He was warned again and again by the state inspector to never, ever leave the gate open because kids or animals could fall into the slew and drown.

  But here it was, standing open.

  Panting, sweating, pissed-off and at the very end of his rope, Elmer caught his breath and approached the fence. The kids’ voices were very loud now. And that’s when he saw something that just could not be, something that made his stomach flip-flop and a weird terror build inside him.

  The kids, all those damn kids, the Bohannon boys and the Galligan twins and half a dozen other shavers that he did not recognize… they were, they were—

  Can’t be! I can’t be seeing this! I can’t !

  But he was. The children were not fooling around on the edge of the lagoon, they were in it. They were hip-deep in that foul, slopping sewage, playing in it like it was the local swimming hole.

  “Get… get out of there!” Elmer cried in a hoarse voice. “You can’t be in there!”

  His mind was whirling around and around in his head. Part of that was from what he was seeing, something he found nearly impossible to process, but much of it was from the gagging, noxious odors of the lagoon itself which was all stirred up by these bat-shit crazy kids.

  The children stopped leaping and splashing and dunking one another in the mire. They stood there, looking at him, brown with shit like they’d been crawling through mud. It was greased in their hair and splashed across their faces. Their eyes were wide and bright. In fact, they were bleached white like ping pong balls, no pupils, no anything. The glazed eyes of dead men.

  “You kids…”

  Elmer tried to speak as he stood there at the gate, but the words and what he was trying to convey with them got all tangled up in his head. His mouth felt numb, his mind foggy.

  Come in with us, Mister Cassling. It’s warm and deep…

  That voice… did he hear it or imagine it? He couldn’t be sure. He only knew one thing: these goddamn kids were insane. He needed to get help. He needed the sheriff out here and maybe county mental health to boot. They were beckoning to him, inviting him into their little game and he was tempted, God help him, but he was tempted because even as a boy the other kids had never invited him to play with them. He was ostracized. An outsider. The subject of derision.

  It’s okay, Mister Cassling. We want you to play with us. We want to show you what fun it is to do those things you’re not supposed to do. We want to show you what it’s like to be a kid, to run wild and free.

  Crazy, that’s what, they were all just crazy. Did they really believe that he would play with them now after they’d ignored him so long ago? Sure, part of him wanted to, maybe it needed to… but he wasn’t about to join in. His hand was wrapped white-knuckled around the gatepost just to show them (and maybe himself) that he wasn’t about to play with them. He was an adult, and he would rain hell down on them over this.

  One of th
em, a girl, stepped up the bank, brown clumps of shit falling from her. She held out her hand and he saw the swollen, undulant mound of her belly.

  Come on, Mister Cassling. It’s so dark and warm in the lagoon, so safe and protected. Like going back inside your mother. Take my hand and slide down here, down into the womb.

  Elmer shook his head frantically side to side. There was no damn way he’d wade in that… that stuff. If his voice wasn’t lodged in his throat, he would have told her that, made her see. The grass was dry. It crunched under his boots. Such a hot day. A nice little dip would be relaxing. But that wasn’t going to happen because he was gripping the gatepost…but if that was true, then why were his hands reaching out to her? And why was the methane stench of human waste filling his head and making him giddy? And, dear God, why was he stepping down into the sewage lagoon, sliding down into its brown, fecal slime depths?

  But it was too late.

  He looked one last time up at the blue sky before the sewage covered his face. He coughed and gagged as it filled his mouth, then his throat and lungs and by then, they were pressing in from all sides… the children and the worms they carried.

  8:33 PM

  When Elmer didn’t come back, Nan started to get worried because he was nothing if not punctual. She knew in many ways that he was flawed, neurotic and brooding over a basket of insecurities, but he was a good man when she was with him. She knew this and understood this even if many did not. His childhood had been hard. There had been no friends and an abusive father. And it was the child, as her mother had once said, that describes the man (or woman).

  He said he was off to straighten out those darn kids again and she had told him to hurry because his supper had already been sitting for an hour.

  But now he had not returned and was not answering his cell. She did not like it. She took a quick walk through the campground and saw no sign of him. His truck was parked over by the woods. The only thing there was the restricted path out to the sewage lagoon.

  Was that where he was?

  She approached the path, feeling uneasy. She was not certain why, but she had a sudden terrible feeling of approaching tragedy. The perfectly weird thing about that was she had not felt it, not to this degree, in years. Not since just before the hospital had called to inform her that her mother had died in her sleep.

  Maybe it was nothing. With everything going on in the country these days, she was simply feeling the way everyone was feeling, she supposed.

  Her heart heavy and thumping in her chest, she started up the path to the lagoon. It was a long walk. It would be dark by the time she got there…unless she took the short cut. Elmer had shown her the way once. She hesitated to take it now because she had a healthy fear of the woods, always afraid she might step on a copperhead or a water moccasin.

  Damn.

  Though her tracking skills were limited, it was easy to see that someone had just been through here. They had apparently charged through like a bull elephant. The grass was pushed down, branches broken and saplings bent aside. It must have been Elmer.

  Nan called his name loudly two or three times, but there was no answer. About half way there, she heard shouting. She paused. The voices of children… and was that Elmer? She distinctly heard the voice of a man mixed in with them.

  Had he caught them at something?

  Was he yelling at them?

  She hoped that’s all it was. She moved faster now, snakes be damned. If Elmer had finally lost control, she needed to get there and stop him before he laid a hand on one of those children.

  Bursting from the woods, just as red-faced and sweaty as Elmer had been, she didn’t bother trying to catch her breath. She charged through the grass to the lagoon where the voices were coming from. She could already smell its high, evil odor. By the time she passed through the gate, everything had gone silent. She saw no children. She did not see Elmer. There was just the lagoon, that steaming swamp of brown rippling excreta. A few ripples passed over its surface as if something was swimming beneath it.

  That bad, very bad feeling peaked in her again and she felt that she was very close to an episode of some kind. She felt dizzy, woozy, her chest tight, her throat constricted.

  It’s the gases. Oh Lord, I’m being overcome by the gases.

  The ripples moved and scattered sluggishly, coming from several directions at the same time though there was no wind. Sweat beading her face, Nan watched them, fascinated by them as her head revolved on its axis like a planet. She began to feel calm. The fear and mounting apprehension lessened appreciably. The ripples were hypnotizing, moving to and fro with no pattern, much like her thoughts.

  She heard a splashing.

  She was not surprised in the least when one shit-slicked head rose from the slough followed by another and another and another. Here the children were! They had only been hiding the entire time, simply playing some harmless little game. They stood there, dripping with sewage, great white worms swimming in the muck, coiling around them, sliding in and out of their mouths. Great glistening clusters of pearls broke the surface. She knew they were eggs, millions of eggs like frog spawn, and that made them much more beautiful as they glimmered and winked. She longed to hold them in her hands, press them against her lips, fondle the white pulsing phallic length of a worm and let it slide between her breasts.

  The lagoon, she heard a voice in her head say. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? It’s a nursery! It is here that the worms brood their larva—in this great lagoon of excrement which is essentially like an artificial womb to them. It mimics the lower human digestive tract where they come to term

  This knowledge made her smile, made her feel beautifully free for the first time in her life, part of something much, much larger than herself. As she slid out of her clothes, drooling and sexually excited, she fondled her breasts and watched the children playing with their worms and shoving handfuls of shit into their mouths which they slurped down greedily, filling themselves with the filthy, disease-ridden dung that the larval worms so favored, creating a perfect biosphere for them.

  The children had formed a circle and from the center of it now rose the form of Elmer—he was naked and erect, a pagan god of fertility draped with worms, molded from brown greasy clay and strung with webs of eggs that pulsed like the hearts of newborn birds.

  When he called to her, Nan did not hesitate to sink into the sewage with him and let it become her.

  WASHINGTON, D.C: MARYLAND AVE

  8:50 P.M.

  Through it all, the Vice President maintained his healthy appetite because with the way things were going at the moment, he figured he needed every bit of strength he could get. With rioting breaking out in major cities, clashes between armed bands and the military, the parasitic infestation sweeping the country (and the globe, if the latest NSC estimates could be believed), things were most assuredly going to hell in a handbasket. Beginning tomorrow, he and the President would no longer be in D.C. together. The President would stay in the White House while the VP was shuttled off to a secure military installation in the Midwest where there was a command-and-control center where the country could be run if something happened to the Commander-in-Chief.

  Though he would have a private gourmet chef at his disposal, the Vice President decided he would have one last good meal in the city. He chose SteakZen because they were not only one of the most exclusive restaurants in D.C. that commonly catered to politicians and visiting dignitaries, but because they simply had the best food.

  He ate alone in a private dining room.

  No aides, no secretaries, just his entourage of Secret Service agents. His wife had already been flown off to the secure location and he would be on Air Force Two within a matter of hours to join her.

  When the Vice President finished his spiced beef and scallops and polished off his cheesecake, he smoked a cigar and that’s when a perfect meal was topped off by a digestif that was a perfect tragedy. A waiter had come and collected the VP’s setting and as
he made to step through the door, nodding to the Secret Service agent who opened it for him, he pulled something that looked like a stick of dynamite out of his sleeve and tossed it behind him. It was a concussion grenade. He dove through the door and as the Secret Service agent reached for him, it went off with a subtle popping noise… followed instantly by a flash of blinding light and a detonation of noise so loud that it incapacitated everyone in the room momentarily.

  By then, four men armed with Uzi submachine guns fitted with long cylinder-shaped silencers stepped into the room. They opened up and killed all three Secret Service agents within seconds. The last Secret Service man, trying to shield the Vice President, had his head blasted into pink-and-red strands of confetti that sprayed over the VP along with a lot of blood.

  “On your feet, Mr. Vice President,” one of the men ordered.

  Still reeling and dizzy, the Vice President pulled himself up, noticing in dismay that the white tablecloth was covered in a smear of red gore.

  “Please,” he gasped. “We can discuss this…”

  But as the men stepped forward, he knew there would be no discussion. They opened up. Their Uzis made only light put-put-put sounds with the noise suppressors screwed onto their barrels. A devastating barrage of 9mm Parabellum rounds chewed through the VP. In a matter of seconds, he took over thirty rounds point-blank.

  Satisfied that the job was done, the men left the building along with their confederates who had infiltrated the restaurant staff.

  At 8:37 PM on August 27th, the Vice President of the United States had been assassinated.

  DETROIT, HOLY CROSS HOSPITAL:

  DETOX WARD, 9:16 P.M.

  It was a battle zone and Johnny Kopok had been through it before so he figured he fit right in seamlessly. He and his new pal—Bertie Panella, a real sweet kid—were on a mission. Their original mission after escaping the morgue was to get out of the hospital, period. But that didn’t work so good because it was under quarantine and every door and window was sealed. It was like trying to break out of Leavenworth or Sing Sing. No dice. Soldiers in white suits were crawling around the building like termites looking for a crack in a wall. So that mission was scrubbed. Johnny and Bertie decided that they needed a better plan.