Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  It was as if people were saying goodbye to a way of life that would soon exist no more.

  At some point during the festivities, people began to notice an odor that was at first vague and then overpowering. It was a sweet/sour/sickening smell that reminded many of the perfume of exotic hothouse orchids or the pungent sweetness of funeral lilies. But as it grew, fuming in the streets, it was not flowers, they decided, but rotting things tossed up on beaches. The moist damp decay beneath fallen trees. A septic stench of medical waste and drainage contained in a flowing hot honeyed sap that put many to their knees, gagging, and made the majority wander about drunkenly, eyes glazed, and mouths hanging open.

  That, of course, caused the first of many tragedies that night.

  Vinyl-eyed tourists with slack, drooling mouths stumbled into each other, fell over each other, shambling mindlessly out into the streets and were hit by cabs and dragged beneath buses and people screamed and sirens blew and vehicles smashed into one another or went careening into the crowds on the walks.

  And it was amidst that chaos that the horror, the true horror, of the evening began. A chubby Portuguese tourist with a huge sack of knock-off Louis Vuitton handbags she’d bought from a street-corner vendor (and planned on hawking on eBay at a significant profit) bumped into a man with eyes like yellow waste and a foaming pink-white mouth. He licked his lips with a black-spotted tongue and the sweet sewer-stink that came off him nearly put the Portuguese lady to her dimpled knees. When he seized hold of her saying, “I’ve brought something pretty just for you,” and opened his mouth with an offering of a worm, said worm did not slide gently from his throat, it exploded out with the force of vomited ejecta. It forced itself into her mouth and filled her.

  People saw it, of course.

  It was hard not to… but at first, amongst the confusion and in a place where anything, absolutely anything goes, they paid little attention to the grubby man and the sizeable woman and the snapping elastic cord connecting their mouths. But when similar events began to break out in every quarter and in every crowd, they began to panic and scream and fight to be free. But the infected were amongst them. And everywhere, worms were revealing themselves. They were creeping from mouths, tangling like vines and sliding through the crowds like bleached snakes. Hosts spewed worm-sauce into faces, released adult forms and maggoty stews of larvae unto the unsuspecting.

  Times Square became a sea of thrashing bodies, an ocean of pandemic parasitic infection. The worms were everywhere: undulant octopus tentacles seeking prey and squirming tubes of gut bursting from cleaved bellies, the tendrils of jellyfish snaring human fish and masses of living white hair and pallid rootlets wiring them up and infesting… and the tourists and soldiers and cops and peddlers were all caught up in it, sinking in that ebon slime-sea as more worms made themselves known, most erupting in appalling flesh-trains from the mouths and asses of their hosts, but others—larger gape-mouthed predatory varieties—rising from sewer gratings and subway ventilation shafts, spraying gouts of clear juice from their mouths that immobilized their victims with a gushing chemical euphoria until they stood around like stunned cows, drunken and grinning. The biochemical trickery of the worms’ secretions made their own brains betray them in their hour of need, blocking neuroreceptors that signaled pain and panic, locking down instinctual drives of fear and self-preservation in tar pits of apathy, reducing them to hollow-eyed junkies and preyfood and fleshmeat tripping out on the unrestricted flow of endorphins from the drug stores of their own gray matter.

  Their brains short-circuited and were hot-wired by the worms and they went happily down on their knees, open-mouthed, to receive white slithering worm-members between their lips and up asses and into vaginas, desecrated and violated, human shells and worm-hotels and dead-eyed host-vessels. The larger mutant predatory flatworms went on the offensive for the meat was free and the meat was easy. Their pink-skinned prey offered no resistance, they begged to be slavered and slobbered over, to be shredded and drained of sweet red juices. Prostrate before the roping, vile forms of their gods, the worms accepted them and turned those who were not already hosts into a slopping red sea of human chum. Glistening, pulsating worm ova overflowed its banks and mired those precious few that found themselves immune to the worms’ neurochemical barrage.

  Those that didn’t lose their minds immediately, fought valiantly. One of them knocked hosts out of his path and had the audacity to take on a worm that was twenty-feet from tip-to-tip, big around at its middle as a beer keg, its segments swollen like inner tubes inflated to the point of bursting with teeming egg clusters. Yet as loathsome and malignant as that worm indeed was, he threw himself at it, he tore into its flesh as its mouth fastened onto his neck and sucked out everything but the vertebrae itself. He went down with globs of running worm-meat clutched in his fingers and the worm itself was badly injured. It yawned its maw to the sky and its many pink tongues writhed and trembled with flying gouts of pink-pale ooze. It let out a shrieking, shrilling cry and then seemed to erupt from internal hydrostatic pressure and its attacker, quite dead by that point, was drowned in a swamp of pearly eggs as each proglottid burst in random succession. For the mother worm, it was not suicide, for each segment was a sac of eggs through which it could reproduce and regenerate itself thousands if not millions of times.

  Others fought, too.

  But most were swarmed by the original invasive hosts who forced them down, drowning them in a vomit-slush of immature worms that quickly invaded any available orifice. From above, it looked like they were sinking in slime-bogs of egg drop soup albumen.

  The police and soldiers in the Square that were not inundated or overwhelmed and did not immediately retreat, drew their weapons and fired indiscriminately into the seething crowds, splitting open heads and puncturing torsos and splashing the throngs with cherry-red blood and scattershots of tissue and bone.

  But it was quite pointless, for the worms owned this night.

  And in the end, the worm conquered all.

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND:

  MARRIOTT HOTEL, CTHULICON 10:13 P.M.

  When the lights went out, Kalen Morse was left in the dark with only half of her makeup applied and she was not too happy about it. The annual Prom-Nomicon was due to start in fifteen fucking minutes and the stupid power went out. As pissed as she was—and, boy, was she pissed—the imaginative side of her mind found it very atmospheric. Too bad there wasn’t a storm to go with it. This was Providence, after all, H.P. Lovecraft’s stomping grounds (or spawning grounds, if you prefer) and Cthulicon was the annual convention devoted entirely to the life and works of that notoriously reclusive horror author who died way back in 1937. He was considered to be the most influential horror writer of the 20th century (sorry, Stephen King) and his ideas had been swiped by writers and movie makers ever since.

  But a storm…now that would have been the balls, Kalen got to thinking. It would have been like Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” where Robert Blake meets up with old Nyarlathotep during an electrical storm.

  Ah, if life was only as simple as finding a banned book and calling up a monstrosity from beyond time and space, she thought.

  Regardless, Kalen knew that lights or no lights, the faithful would be meeting downstairs in Banquet Room C. In fact, the idea of doing it by candlelight would pack them in. With that in mind, she was not about to miss it. Being a former Girl Scout, Kalen was ready for any emergency and she dug a candle out of her bag, gave it some flame, and did her best with her makeup. When she was done, she slipped into her white tunic dress, twisted the gold serpent armband over her right bicep—no easy bit—slid a stack of fifty bracelets over her left wrist, and stepped into her sandals.

  Not bad, she thought. Not bad at all.

  The tunic fit her curves very nicely and the shining blue trapezohedron necklace captured the blue of her eyes and gave her that Cleopatra look she’d been going for. Stuffing her blonde hair up into a hair net, she pulled on a tripa
rtite Hathor wig with long beaded locks and completed the look with a horned headpiece complete with solar disc and a uraei-kalathos cobra.

  “Bling-bling! Tell me I’m not Queen Nitocris,” she said to the mirror. “Tell me I will not wow those fanboys and leave them drooling all over their rubber tentacles, oh Nyarlathotep the Black Pharaoh.”

  This was going to work and she knew it. It was only really a matter of navigating her way down there now. Elevators would be out so she’d have to take the stairs and try not to trip over her sandals. It would not be an easy descent. She couldn’t wait to get down there and feel all those eyes on her. She knew she would be absolutely devastating by candlelight. The only downside was Rube Keeler, the editor of the small-print rag Tome of the Black Winds which published Lovecraftian fiction, mostly fan-stuff. Rube would be sniffing around her all night and if she didn’t pay any attention to him, he’d get miffed and start an argument.

  Rube was good at that.

  That morning in the dealer’s room, Kalen had picked up an old Lin Carter paperback and Rube went after her right away. “How can you read such shat?” he asked her.

  “Who said I read this stuff? I just like the covers.”

  That only exasperated him more. He got so worked up he had to hit his inhaler twice. “Lin Carter is tepid, repetitive, unimaginative imitation. Save for August Derleth himself, nobody spread more shit around than this guy.”

  “Do tell,” Kalen said, deciding then and there she simply had to buy a Derleth book if she could find one. As Rube went on and on, she located the British Panther edition of Derleth’s The Shuttered Room and made sure Rube saw it.

  “That’s a perfect example!” he steamed. “That’s fucking Derleth again taking a fragment, a sentence Lovecraft wrote, and building a story off of it and claiming they collaborated. Collaborated, my ass. That’s like me finishing the missing texts of The Dead Sea Scrolls and saying I collaborated with fucking God. Derleth and Carter were two completely talentless fuckwits cashing in on Lovecraft. That’s all they were.”

  “Who’s arguing?”

  “Really,” he said. “What’s Lovecraft’s greatest contribution?”

  “Tentacles?”

  “Cosmic horror. That’s what it’s about. The idea that there are things out there that consider the Earth and its inhabitants to be meaningless. Of no more significance than ants you step on. An immense, malignant cosmic horror that dwarves the puny anthropocentric religions and races of this minor speck of dust. And that’s exactly what Derleth and Carter missed—it’s not about forbidden books and unpronounceable entities and all that tripe. That’s window dressing. That’s the look without the content.”

  He was right and she knew he was right. Just as he’d been right last year when he told the crowds that Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness was simply a metaphor for Lovecraft’s own insecurities and intolerances. A class struggle. The Old Ones were the highly-cultured, refined, and intellectual WASPS of New England and the Shoggoths were the crude, boorish working classes and immigrants flooding Lovecraft’s beloved countryside. He was right but, hey, you could also read it as a monster story.

  Kalen knew that tonight Rube would be drinking and he’d be in rare form.

  Leaving her room, she moved down the corridor via the emergency lights. She bumped into a guy festooned in green papier-mâché tentacles. “Nitocris! You look awesome!” he said.

  “Wish I could say the same for you.”

  That stopped him. “What?”

  “I’m teasing you, oh great Yog-Sothoth.”

  “I’m a Cthonian…can’t you tell?”

  “Whatever.”

  Kalen found the stairs, wondering why she came to these things sometimes. People were so cliquey and thin-skinned. The truth was that the fanboy’s costume was mega-lame, but she wasn’t going to hurt his little feelings. A lot of these people bruised so easily. And she was nothing if not kind and understanding. Okay, now and then she spoke her mind and pissed people off and that had cost her four boyfriends and two best friends, but fuck ‘em if they couldn’t take a joke. Kalen saw herself as a reasonable person. Others rarely agreed. She would have been surprised—and bruised—if she found out that on the fan circuit she was often referred to as Cunt-thulu or The Black Bitch of Karneter. She could never have conceived of such petty hatred and jealousy.

  Down the stairs she went and aside from a few glowing red EXIT signs, it was very black in the stairwell. She passed no one. Saw no one. She wondered what caused the blackout as she felt herself being pulled deeper into the darkness, slowly engulfed. As she made her way slowly towards the first floor landing she became aware of a high, sweet stink that was as weird as it was intriguing… fruiting, fermenting, ripe and sharp… it made her feel like she was stoned and she wondered if somebody had been smoking some imported stuff in there.

  When she felt hands take hold of her, all she could say was: “What?”

  Then something was pressed into her hands and at first, she thought somebody had slid his willy into her palms… something that in her current state of mind wasn’t quite as offensive as it might have been otherwise… and she gripped it. It slid across her fingers. Tactilely, the feel of the thing was exciting and somehow soothing. It was warm and throbbing and quite phallic, so soft and greasy. Without really giving it much thought, she decided it would feel exquisite against her tongue, so she sank to her knees and opened her mouth and let it slide on down as she gagged.

  At the Prom-Nomicon, she was going to really wow them.

  CHICAGO, RIVER NORTH:

  THE WAREHOUSE, 10:30 P.M.

  When they came in to untie him, Harry Niles figured they were only doing it because they were going to kill him. Because soon as he was taken to this place—when was that? Two hours ago? Three? Five? Six?—he knew one thing and one thing for sure: there were Spooks in this world and then there were Spooks. And this guy, the old one with the white beard and eyes like sapphires… he was the real deal. He was the apex predator in a world of shadow agencies, black budget ops, and clandestine spookery. He had been in to see Harry twice now and each time he said nothing, he just looked and nodded, studied Harry with his flat, predatory almost reptilian eyes.

  Now he was back, and he had two thugs with him. Not the guys that had brought Harry in but a couple others. In his mind, they all blended together: mannequins, wooden dummies, marionettes worked by a dark and malefic puppet-master whom Harry suspected had a white beard and eyes like a snake.

  The thugs untied him.

  “Is that better, Mr. Niles?” the Old Man asked.

  “In comparison to what?”

  One of the thugs nearly smiled which proved no matter what kind of heavy he was, there was something remotely human in him. A weak, nearly-extinguished candle of it, but something.

  Harry sat there rubbing some feeling into his wrists. Time had gone somewhat fluid and elastic for him and he was not sure how long he had been here or where here was. When they had taken him out of the mall and to a waiting sedan, they had injected him with something. Some kind of tranquilizer. He remember getting real silly in the car, saying crazy shit, old jokes rolling from his lips: What happened when Jesus went to Mount Olive? Popeye beat the shit out of him. Why did Mickey Mouse file for a divorce? Because Minnie was fucking Goofy. Three guys are walking down a road. They see a sheep with its ass up in the air. The first guy says, I wish that was Megan Fox. The second guy says, I wish that was Jessica Alba. The third guy says, I wish it was dark. On and on and then waking in this place. With these people. He was in the shit and he knew it. Shit that was so deep he might drown in it, but not before its smell was shoved so far up his nose that it became a permanent part of him.

  The Old Man watched him.

  Harry watched the Old Man.

  “Anytime you want to get around to it,” Harry said. “I’m listening.”

  The Old Man pulled up a chair and sat down so very carefully and precisely that Harry thought
maybe he had a sore ass. But that wasn’t it at all and he knew it. This guy was not only precise, but meticulous, fastidious: everything he did was done with great care and absolute mental application.

  “Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Niles?”

  “No, I don’t. Are you guys Jehovah’s Witnesses? Listen, I’m sorry I slammed the door in your faces.”

  “Hmm,” the Old Man said. “About what I expected. From all I’ve heard of you, Mr. Niles, you seem to enjoy your flippant sense of humor.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because this is very serious.”

  “I figured that when your boys arrested me.”

  “You’re not under arrest exactly, Mr. Niles. Let’s just say you’ll be confined for a time. If you play ball, you’ll walk out the door. If you don’t, well, you’ll have to stay.”

  “That sounds pretty black-and-white.”

  “It is.”

  Harry looked at the thugs standing there. “Okay, before you have your goons break my fingers, let me tell you what I think this is all about. First off, you’ve linked me with Shawna Geddes. You’ve got that right. She’s my friend and I am with her. So, you’re good on that part. Now, what has your tit in the wringer is apparently that you think Shawna saw something she wasn’t supposed to. She did. She saw an abduction and then, later, a secret biocontainment operation. And since then, she’s been on the run and in fear of her life. The bottom line is: she doesn’t know exactly what she saw. I’m guessing it was the earliest outbreaks of the mystery parasite. But now there’s similar operations going on everywhere. So hunting her down is absolutely pointless. Don’t you see that?”

  The Old Man was considering it. “You have a reputation of nosing into things that don’t concern you, Mr. Niles. You have to know you’ve made more than a few powerful enemies.”

  “Correction: I had a reputation for nosing into things. Now I’m a tabloid writer. Shawna was an assistant gardening editor. What possible danger are we to you now?”