Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  It was 1968. The fucking Tet. Christ, everything was confused. He had his rifle but where was the rest of his gear? No frags. No magazines. Jesus, where was that belt for the Sixty? Goddamn L-T was going to core his ass over that one. He was separated from the platoon. He jogged down the stairs and examined the enemy he had killed.

  Hell was this?

  VC in white uniforms and spaceman helmets? Fuck was that all about? Johnny had seen some crazy-ass shit in the ‘Nam, but this beat all. And they were big for Viets, real big like Americans. Hell was going on in this war now?

  He kicked them to see if they had any fight left in them, but no, they were toast, he’d greased both of them with the first volley. That’s when he noticed they were both carrying American weapons. Well, didn’t that beat all?

  Goddamn Charlie Cong! What’s this about now?

  He took two magazines from them, but he didn’t have time to do much else; he had to link up with the platoon. He went through the door and the goddamn VC were everywhere. Christ, a nest of them! He opened up on full auto, wasting three of them before they even got their AKs up.

  The others began to return fire.

  Johnny got behind a desk. Oh, what he wouldn’t have given for a couple frags right then. He heard voices shouting. Since when did the gooks speak English? They were messing with him. Psychological warfare. He darted up, getting off a few rounds and driving the white-suited Cong back.

  “LIUETENANT!” he cried out. “CHARLIE’S GOT ME BOXED IN! NEED BACK-UP HERE!”

  Where the fuck was Pete with that Sixty? Shit and shit. Only one thing to do now. Johnny ran out from behind the desk firing from the hip as rounds chewed up the real estate around. Oh yes, oh fucking yes, he could see the daylight! Get out of here! Hump it! He caught one in the shoulder and he drilled two more bubble-headed VC and then he was out the doors.

  He ejected a magazine and saw a dozen Charlies bearing down on him. He began firing, counterattacking as per his Marine training. He jerked as bullets ripped through him, but he didn’t stop until he’d emptied his mag and killed three more of those fucking Cong. Then his legs went out from under him and he rolled into the grass, blood gushing out of him, his entire body convulsing.

  “Too late, too late,” he muttered as the VC surrounded him, staring down at him from their bubbles. “You ain’t got me… I’m KIA, you fucking slopes… I won and you lost and… and… and…”

  Johnny smelled the fresh air and saw the blue sky one last time before the darkness took him. But it was okay, it was all okay, because he was going to a better place where those fish-stinking slopes could not follow.

  As he died, it was the Tet Offensive of 1968 again and he had bought it there by the Perfume River, enemy dead scattered around him. And being that he had not really lived since that night so long ago, it was fitting. He had died like a Marine and he had never wanted anything more.

  RICHMOND, VIRGINIA:

  CBT CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS

  2:10 P.M

  As she listened to the voice of Gordon Parks ramble on and on and on, Elizabeth Toma contemplated the end of all things, the destruction of western civilization as she knew it, the termination of the dirty machine of democracy that had started as a pleasant dream and ended up as a corrupt nightmare.

  “Our ultimate goal, of course, is to realign, reengineer, and reimagine society. The body of the nation and that of the world in general has been contaminated by divisiveness and subversion. There is no going forward at this juncture. There is only a drunken stumbling from the right to the left and back again, miring ourselves in the waste products of so-called freedom, which inevitably leads to—”

  Sneering, Elizabeth shook her head. Here was one of The Collective’s vanguards of the New World Order. A pompous, chatty, treacherous fool. Of all the unmitigated idiocy. Parks was so arrogant that he dared lay out the subjugation of the masses in a memo to himself. She could just imagine him pacing his spacious office in the hub of the NSA, listening to the rest of the world, never once considering that he might be listened to.

  She was both surprised and disturbed that the nation’s uber-spook was not even aware of the technology that CBT routinely employed—Skybox, an autonomous drone technology that could look down through any building and listen to any conversation, even that of a certain pretentious gas-bag who happened to be the director of the NSA in his supposedly secure lair.

  “…have learned that nearly any belief system can be implanted in the human animal following an injection of fear, anxiety, or unwanted excitement in their dull, compart-mentalized lives. Such shocks to the societal system of the sort following declaration of war, a terror attack or pandemic, create a void of uncertainty in the common man or woman. As anxiety spikes, so does the need to be reassured and coddled, leaving the population at large wide open to mass suggestibility. They will willingly summit to the suspension of civil rights and due process of law if their leaders will only ‘make it better’ so that they can return to their simplistic, dumbed-down roles of workers, breeders, and mindless consumers. These are our livestock. They can be reimagined and refitted at our will—throwaway soldiers to tax payers, incited mobs to bovine animals, all drugged on self-indulgence, preservatives, and professional sports…”

  It would have been so easy to discredit him at this point, to report him to The Collective and watch with great amusement as they took him off at the knee, destroying his life and bleeding the hot air from him. There had been a time when such things were a major pastime with her, an addiction, a drug she craved…but not any longer. She was not sure what was important anymore.

  She thought of Parks and his games.

  She thought of Bob Pershing and his infantile little coup.

  But mostly she thought of The Collective—their subterfuge, their betrayal, their disloyalty. It was the deceit that irked her. She had given up everything for them, performed the most vile, unethical, and, yes, even disgusting and treasonous acts for them. They had been like a religion to her. She even let Astrid go because that’s what they wanted. She hadn’t even dared to raise an eyebrow when they killed her.

  And for that, for all of that, they include that pathetic dick-sucking frat boy Gordon Parks into the highest echelons of their agenda and disclude her? How dare they. It went far beyond insult. It was a personal attack on her intelligence and loyalty. They were kicking her like a sick dog.

  Fuming, she listened.

  “…and with this radical, cutting edge EMF technology, the memory, consciousness, and instinctual drives of our livestock can be accessed, rewritten, and reengineered to benefit society’s needs. Now imagine this marvelous electromagnetic tele-stimulation of the brain used in conjunction with an implant of sorts—an organic implant, if you will, a parasite that can be completely controlled by the aforementioned EMF transmissions. As said parasite is controlled, it controls its host. And that is the basis of what we have come to call MINDWORM, a triumph of experimental social engineering which will completely subvert and redirect the future of the race, bringing a calming, benign influence that will restore order and stimulate purpose, creating a unified world government out of chaos…”

  Mindworm.

  Mindworm.

  Mindworm.

  Elizabeth had listened to the above a dozen times now and each time, it made her angrier. This was what they had let Gordon Parks in on and left her out of—the greatest manipulation of the masses ever conceived. There he sat, dictating out loud the basis of something that was leagues above top secret. The sort of thing that could easily destroy the military-industrial-political establishment of the country were it leaked to journalists and foreign nations.

  “And you picked this buffoon over me,” she said out loud, hoping that she was being listened to. “The man who sold the world.”

  She knew that The Collective had access to technology far beyond anything available to the NSA. Skybox was something they routinely employed. There was another shadow technology, she had
heard, which could target and follow the unique bioelectrical brain frequency of anyone on the planet. There was even a rumor that information processed by minds could be decoded by evoking the potentials emitted.

  But I don’t believe they can read my thoughts. Not yet. And if they can, then what I’m thinking will not only bring them to their knees but destroy their Machiavellian fantasies of world domination. No longer shall I be the fuck-ee, but the fuck-er. See how they like it.

  She knew exactly what she was going to do and it was not so much out of anger, but because of what they had done to Astrid. How they had dirtied her and tossed her into the trash. That was unforgivable and they would pay for it. One good fucking deserved another.

  Her plan hatched in detail, now it was only a matter of waiting for the inevitable phone call.

  But until then, until Mr. Brown called and arrangements could be made, she pulled the SD card from her laptop and inserted it into a MOTO prepaid phone, a burner, that she would throw away after using it. She sent a file to DCI Charles VanderMissen. She was certain he would enjoy it.

  OKLAHOMA CITY: BRICKTOWN

  ROLAND’S MEAT MARKET

  1:37 P.M CST

  For days and days, Audrey laid in bed, on the floor, and, for a strange sojourn of hours, in the closet when the bright lights of daytime had threatened to burn her eyes from their sockets. And all that time, as her guts bucked and jumped and she vomited out a thin, watery gruel of bile, she had thought of food.

  Particularly meat.

  Though she was feverish, shaking and convulsing, and had lost complete control of her bodily functions, the parasite that dwelled within her desired nutrients, particularly protein. Fully in command of her limbic system by that point, it triggered her hypothalamus to release mega-doses of ghrelin in her stomach, the hormone that stimulates hunger.

  By the time she made it out into the streets, hunched-over and delusional, her appetite had reached epic proportions. It cut her open from the inside like razor blades, making her hurt and cry out. People got out of her way and cars slammed on their brakes when she crossed their path.

  Soon enough, she found others like her, and in a body, they shambled through the streets, seeking that very thing which would satisfy them. By the time they reached Roland’s Meat Market, there were nearly twenty of them fixed on a single unified purpose: to feed.

  As Audrey stumbled along with the others, panting and sweating, her eyes pink as fresh tenderloin, the hunger erupted inside her like a cluster bomb of biochemical compulsion. She needed food, she wanted to stuff the yawning hollow within, pack it with juicy red meat, marinate it in blood, and season it with salty nougat globs of yellow marrow.

  “Hungry,” she grumbled, slime running down her chin. “Am so hungry hungry hungreeeee…”

  With the knowledge that meat was near to hand, her appetite became a raging sugar-toothed monster of addiction. It understood only satiety. There was nothing else in the world and maybe there never had been.

  Her hands morphed into ensanguined claws as she tore ruts in her jaundice-yellow face. Her teeth worried at her lips, tearing and gnawing the delicate tissue into pink bleeding strips that she ground to flesh mush beneath her molars, her greedy mouth sucking the blood from them.

  It tasted… delicious.

  Like the juice of plump cherries and succulent strawberries and dewy blood oranges. Pure ambrosia. Pure ecstasy that made her tremble right down to her piss-soaked loins. The others were pretty much doing the same—driven into a frenzy of hunger, they bit and chewed at themselves, eating their own lips and mouths, even biting their arms and nipping at their fingers.

  Then they burst through the sliding glass doors of Roland’s Meat Market, red-mouthed and blood-eyed, a monstrous throng that sent customers running. But not Rico Pedaris. This was his goddamn place and things were going to hell in the world, surely, but he was not about to surrender the market to these…these crazies. Absolutely fucking not. It was his bastion of safety and normality. He was not about to give that up.

  “HEY!” he cried out. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY STORE! YOU HEAR ME? GET THE HELL OUT OR I’LL CALL THE COPS OR THE FUCKING ARMY!”

  Although they were everywhere, he sighted in on the one closest to reach, which happened to be Audrey. She was going wild, scattering loafs of bread and buns in every which direction in her search for what her parasite demanded.

  Rico grabbed her by the crook of the arm and pulled her away. She snarled at him, bared teeth on full display through the ragged hole of her mouth. She clawed at his face. He shoved her back, putting her right on her ass. Then another arm circled his throat. Rico pivoted and broke free. Another crazy was standing there, this one a man with red tears running from his eyes. Rico punched him right in the face two or three times, but he did not go down. No, in fact, he just stood there as if he could not understand the nature of being hit.

  Rico shoved him out of the way and took hold of a woman who was tossing canned goods around. He cringed instantly because the flesh at the back of her neck sloughed free in a single moist sheet.

  The good thing was that while most of his employees had bolted, some had stayed to fight the good fight. Margie Cantrell was one of them. She fought a valiant defensive action, trying to keep the crazies away from the meat cases. She had a broomstick in her hands, and she was whacking away at them like a Viking with a broadsword.

  Audrey was unconcerned about what was happening to her associates. Like the others, she was completely selfish in the getting of food. As Margie Cantrell fought side-by-side with Stevie Coombs, the stock boy, she took advantage of the situation and slipped right around the fighting, hissing mob, and climbed over the counter.

  She found the meat.

  Mine, she thought. It’s all mine.

  Ribeye and sirloin and porterhouse steaks, raw hamburger and chicken, pork chops and fresh sausages and linked wieners, roasts and shanks and filets. It was all hers. Inside, she surged with delight. She felt like a starving shark happening upon some disaster at sea—here was all the bloody chum she would ever need. She smacked what remained of her lips and licked pink foam from her mouth.

  Without further ado, Audrey began to eat.

  She lunged at the meat, not just biting it but striking it like a hungry piranha, ripping out juicy chunks and well-marbled strips and tender slivers, shoving more and more into her mouth until she gagged. She vomited out globs of half-chewed meat in a foamy gush, only to begin eating again, trying to fill the hollow within herself that could never be satisfied.

  The other crazies overwhelmed Rico and his last two employees. They weren’t interested in what was in the meat cases, that was purely pedestrian, but what was hanging in the back—the hams and beef shanks, turkeys and chickens. This was what they went after.

  About that time, the police showed.

  They were not in the best of moods. This martial law shit was strictly for the birds. It quadrupled their workload and every available body was pulling twelve hour shifts (and hoping that when the dust settled, they’d get paid for it). Three of them stepped through the door with riot guns in their hands. They were led by Sergeant McQueen. He was not amused by what he saw because he’d been seeing it all day. At times, it made his flesh crawl; at others, it sickened and angered him.

  “YOU PEOPLE!” he called out. “I WANT YOU OUT OF THIS GODDAMN STORE RIGHT NOW!”

  The other cops looked at him—was this guy for real? It was plain to see the sort of condition these people were in. They were infested. Trying to talk them out of the store was like trying to talk a mole off your arm or the nose off your face.

  “Well, I tried,” he said. “Okay, waste these shitbags.”

  The cops opened up. They dropped five or six of the crazies in the first volley, the remainder in the second.

  It was a horrible sight.

  The crazies—McQueen preferred to call them wormies—were so used and abused by their parasites, drained and degraded and broken, that the
y seemed to liquefy when the rounds chewed into them. Parts dropped off, fluids splashed and tissue spattered. They hit the floor in writhing tangles, quivering and convulsing, the parasites inside them making slurping and rending sounds as they exposed themselves—oily white worms slick with blood and bile, fattened on the juice of their hosts, exuding milky secretions like lactating tits. They burst from mouths and asses and soft, spongy bellies. The body pile continued to shudder and the worms continued to erupt in vermiform coils, suckering mouths opening and closing. They were like dozens of disease-swollen tongues licking the anatomical waste that had given them birth, leaving their shrunken hosts folded and pinched like origami, squeezed out like fleshy peaches in a gushing soup of human pulp, abandoned like deflated sex-dolls.

  Audrey oozed free of the central mass (the cops having fled in terror), crawling forward like a crushed spider, leaving a trail of slime and septic discharge in her wake. She moved with cracking, popping, slushy noises as the colossal parasite which had dislocated her jaws as it emerged pulled itself ever forward in search of food, its hooks scraping over the floor like cat’s claws. The majority of it was still inside her and it dragged her carcass along behind it until it reached the refrigerator room in the back where all the immense shanks of meat hung by hooks. Only then did it discard her as it drilled into a juicy side of beef, clusters of eggs dropping from it as it tunneled ever deeper, glutting itself and awaiting a new host to complete its life cycle.

  LOCATION UNKNOWN: THE BIRD NEST,

  S5 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES FACILITY

  3:09 PM

  By that point, Shawna didn’t know much of anything. She’d been shot up with drugs. Interrogated. Threatened. Locked in a cell. And—it had to be the drugs—abducted by aliens. All of it was scrambled in her head. She was not even truly sure what her captors wanted. Part of her—the part that was trying desperately to escape from the fog like a sabretooth tiger trying to claw free from a black sucking tar pit—told her that, yes, she had asked again and again, maybe until her throat was raw and dry but—