Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  “Imagine that, eh?” Elizabeth said. “A necklace that is both beautiful and deadly. Equipped with a thermal trigger, it requires only body heat to activate it.”

  The necklace was burning now.

  Mr. Brown waited for the punchline and when he didn’t get it, he raced for the door with the others in tow. Elizabeth smiled. We’ll see them in hell, eh, Astrid? By the time Mr. Brown got his hand on the doorknob, the necklace blazed between her breasts, scalding her. There was a rumbling and that was the last thing any of them heard as the 14th floor of the Piedmont Building was vaporized into a rolling mushroom cloud of fire and debris.

  CHICAGO, CHINATOWN:

  PING TOM MEMORIAL PARK

  11:27 A.M

  Harry worked it from every possible angle, but he still could not break through. Shawna seemed impervious. If she was indeed the victim of some sort of behavioral modification, then the control went deep. He didn’t really think he’d be able to break her. She would need to be deprogrammed by professionals. Only that or some major trauma would snap her out of it.

  But what might that be?

  As they walked through the park, they chatted about what they were going to do next. Harry had a few plans and laid them out for her. Her responses seemed perfectly ordinary. She was happy to get out of the city, disturbed and frightened by what was happening to the country, and paranoid about the future. That was right, that was in line with rational, independent thinking.

  But he wasn’t satisfied.

  Not in the least.

  He kept working the subject back to what she had done when the pizza hit men had gotten Stein. And every time, she blinked her eyes three times and said, “I ran. I’ve been running since. I finally made it to Gabe’s. But he’s not there. I don’t know where he is.”

  It made him scared for her. Scared because he was totally out of his league with this shit. If he could find the trigger, he might be able to switch her on and reveal her programming…and would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

  About the fifth time he’d asked her the same question, something which should have annoyed the shit out of her, she suddenly stopped. She looked at him with glassy eyes. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a slim book. Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. She stared at the cover. She began to page through it with a silly little grin on her face.

  She turned to him. “I need to do it before you tell,” she said in an alarming monotone.

  “Do what, Shawna? What are you supposed to do?”

  “I have to do it before you tell.”

  He was getting the gist of it now and he began to sweat. “It’s too late, Shawna. I already told. Everyone knows now. They know all about it.”

  That stopped her for a moment. Her eyes became very glazed and she said, “But you must not ever, never tell. Sam said so.”

  “Who’s Sam, Shawna. Tell me who Sam is?”

  “Sam-I-Am.”

  What the hell was this? Dr. Fucking Seuss? Sam-I-Am, Sam-I-Am. Was he hearing this right? The children’s book was her trigger? But, sure, why not? They had pulled this out of her mind, out of her childhood. It must have meant a great deal to her, so they used this as the basis of her programming. It was the foundation and the trigger.

  “That Sam-I-Am,” she said. “That Sam-I-Am. He says you must not ever, never tell.”

  “Shawna…”

  He knew what was coming next. He saw her reach in the bag and come out with the handgun. Then he grabbed her wrist and she screamed. On the ground, they fought for possession of the weapon as she shrieked like a madwoman, drooling and feral-eyed.

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND:

  NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

  11:43 A.M.

  They were coming for him and he knew it.

  He did not know who to trust.

  He did not know who to call.

  Sitting at his desk, Gordon Parks tried to reach The Collective again and again, but there was nothing. Were they abandoning him now, too? Had they tossed him out into the cold to face the wrath of the country on his own? Would they dare?

  But he knew.

  Oh yes, he knew: they’d sacrifice him in a minute. The agenda was the thing, the careful engineering of the future—MINDWORM. That’s all they cared about. How many times had they told them that nothing must stand in the way of the agenda?

  Yes.

  Yes.

  And this could only be achieved through what was known as ECHO—Enhanced Cognitive High-Frequency Override. It was a miracle of cognitive science. Based upon research gleaned from MK-ULTRA and successive behavior modification programs, it was known that memory, consciousness, and self could be completely accessed and modified by electromagnetic means. Using remote tele-stimulation of the brain, existing personalities, drives, and desires could be erased and re-written.

  Which was the ultimate goal of ECHO.

  First national, then global, control. The ultimate aim of The Collective right from the start.

  Though it was whitewashed as an ionospheric heater for experimental communications, ECHO was in fact a binary electromagnetic weapons system, consisting of two highly-classified experimental broadcasting arrays—one in Mexico and another in Alaska. Utilizing super-high frequency oscillations, its purpose was to create a neutral cavity between the ionosphere and the conducting layers of the Earth’s surface, through which electrical impulses tuned to human brain wave frequencies could be broadcast for the purpose of mind control and mental disruption.

  Once it went live, there would be no more resistance—the will of the few could be imposed on the many. Once programmed by ECHO, the human herds would not only accept it but actively seek it as a small child seeks its mother’s approval.

  Trembling, Parks knew he had to act now before the FBI came for him. Because they would come. It was only a matter of time.

  He picked up his encrypted sat phone and called the number. It was pre-programmed. The line was answered immediately. Parks relayed the code words.

  “Yes?” said the voice.

  “Activate ECHO,” he said, trying to sound calm. Repeat: activate ECHO.”

  Which was his last command before the worms came for him, delivering him into a higher office.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, 11:51 A.M.

  Naked and deranged, the President of the United States crawled over the floor of the Oval Office, spasms making his entire body shudder with excruciating muscular convulsions. He vomited pale foam and curds of clotted blood.

  Inside, he thought with rage and pure horror. My enemies are not just outside looking in, but inside looking out. They are inside me, inside my guts, eating me from within, chewing and sucking and slavering…

  He went mad with the idea, rolling and quivering and kicking, tearing at his face and belly with his nails, trying to lay himself open, trying to make the evil within show itself, expose itself. He was an exorcist, and it was a demon possessing him. Blood ran from him. It oozed in droplets from his pores and spurted from open wounds, dripped from his mouth and even seeped from his ass.

  Oh, the monsters, the monsters, the monsters.

  He continued to convulse with jerking, spastic muscular contractions, screaming and spitting, hissing and shrieking like the lunatic he now was.

  And then something began to happen.

  He could feel it in his throat, something that made him gag and shudder and spit out loops of blood. It filled his throat, then his mouth. One last heave and it emerged—a coiling white worm. He pulled it free and threw it across the room where it wiggled obscenely, blind and helpless and essentially weak.

  There was a pain down low in his abdomen and the President felt a marvelous sense of release. Another worm. This one hung from his ass and he pulled it out ring by juicy ring, first thinking it was his intestines, then realizing the gruesome truth. This one was much larger, nearly four feet in length. Like the other, it coiled and squirmed, a gelatinous slime exuding from its segments and running through his fingers like liquid so
ap.

  He would destroy it.

  He would crush it.

  Let it know who the master was.

  But at the last moment, he found that he could not. It threatened him in no way, it merely hung limp in his hands. It made an odd trilling sound as it vibrated subtly under his fingers, seeming to purr like a cat. Though something—some vague, as yet unsubmerged strand of humanity—in the back of his mind demanded that he kill the thing, smash it to paste…he found that he couldn’t. It no longer stank of blood and waste. No, in fact it smelled sweetly. It smelled delicious. Like honey, the President thought. Like Halloween treats. Like Christmas cookies and Easter baskets. It brought with it the delight of childhood in those precious fragrances. It was moving now, sliding through his fingers and over his palm, its many segments juicing fatly with eggs.

  This was not his enemy.

  The President knew that.

  No, this was his friend. The worm was a friend to all mankind if you thought about it in the right way. The worm could save the race from itself, open up new doors and close old ones, deliver humanity from itself and into a sparkling beautiful future where things like war and jealousy, hatred and discord were just bad dreams from the infancy of the race.

  “You are good,” the President said, holding the glistening worm up before his blood-spattered face, feeling sexually aroused from its continual phallic throbbing. “But together we are great.”

  Opening his mouth, he accepted the worm and was accepted by it.

  CHICAGO: PING TOM PARK, 12:15 P.M.

  The sound, the sound, the sound, oh dear Christ, the sound—

  Harry and Shawna were no longer fighting for control of the gun. It was forgotten in the grass. They stared at each other with glassy, unseeing eyes, looking into each other and through each other.

  A voice in the back of Harry’s mind thought, can you hear that? Can you? It’s louder now, but you’ve heard it before… haven’t you?

  Although his thoughts were scattering in his brain like rice at a wedding or, perhaps, dandelion fuzz blown by the four winds… he recognized the sound with some part of his reasoning mind which was failing rapidly now. The humming. It was so familiar, yet so exotic. But he knew, knew, that he had heard it before… at the very outer limit of audibility, it had always been there as a steady rumbling he could only hear in a silent room in the dead of night. Now it was gaining in strength until it filled his head with a building reverberation that became a cacophonous roaring… an irritating, delirious noise that made him want to scratch his skin off and gouge his eyes out. It was crawling over him in waves like millions of insects.

  Shawna felt it, too. She was rocking back and forth in the grass, clutching her head, her eyes wide and wet, the pupils dilating and then shrinking to pinpoints, again and again and again.

  Harry felt alone.

  He felt not just afraid but terrified.

  This was not right… this was too loud…

  As the volume, at least his perception of it, increased, he stared up into the sky with gleaming eyes. My God, it was… gigantic. The sky was immense and endless, a titanic sea that was all of space and time, ever-widening, opening, becoming bluer than blue, a deep rich sapphire that was crystalline and geometrically complex, a world without end.

  It was then as his mind began to empty, that he started to scream.

  MINDWORM—NATIONWIDE

  And all across the country, in cities and towns and villages, in fields and parks and streets and at crossroads, the infected stopped trying to spread their spawn and stuff raw meat into their mouths as something of a higher influence and complex order seized control of them with a stark, godless domination. Millions of them thronged and huddled together and looked up, up, and up into the sky that was bluer than blue, cerulean and sapphire and cobalt and blazing azure. They stared into it, transfixed by its immensity, hypnotized, compelled, and summoned by something much bigger than themselves. They looked up with translucent eyes as the worms within them answered the call of dominance that ECHO broadcast.

  They were not human anymore.

  They were not exactly worm forms.

  They were a monstrous new hybrid that trembled beneath the electric indigo of the sky high above. They were a new generation that had just been born, a mass birthing of mindless drones and worker insects with no will of their own whose minds were hollow, empty…waiting, waiting to be filled. Millions and millions of mosquito larvae that had hatched simultaneously from the same black, stagnant pond to rise up into the mist, squirming grubs with no conception of their place in the order of things.

  And slowly, subtly and with evil intent, the ECHO array instructed them on exactly what that was to be.

  12:17 P.M.

  At Ping Tom Park in Chicago, Shawna’s carefully-constructed conditioning eroded and collapsed and her psyche went with it. The intervention of ECHO rewrote who and what she was. In her mind, things crashed and shattered and were reduced to thousands of jagged tiny fragments that winked back the light of reason. She was aware that something was taking hold of her, some blind and hysterical compulsion that she could not deny.

  “HAAAAAARRRRRYYYY!” she cried out with everything she had. “HARRY HELP ME OH HELP ME OH DEAR GOD HELP MEEEEEE!”

  But he couldn’t help her or make the booming noise in her mind just go away. He was stiff and fear-stricken, pure terror crawling in his eyes, reflecting his mind which was a cauldron of terror.

  There was nothing left now.

  With a lingering shred of free will, he knew it. This was MINDWORM. This was the absolute mindfuck, the mouse that roared, the thing from the pit, the house that Jack had built, and the horror bred by omnipotent men with too much money and too much power because it was never, ever enough—they always wanted more.

  Now they were stealing the nation’s minds, using ECHO technology to reduce the race to rats in a maze, shambling brain dead zombies, mindless drones serving the bloated, wicked queen of a corrupt and evil democracy—

  With his last bit of strength, he picked up Shawna’s gun as his mind ran inside his head like a runny finger-painting, dripping and mixing into a formless, colorless gray drainage.

  She was face-down in the grass, shaking and sobbing as her mind was emptied.

  No, by God, I won’t let you have her… I… will… not… allow… it…

  Trembling, he pressed the gun to the back of her head and jerked the trigger as something inside him screamed. By then, his ability to reason was gone. It was a light fading in the distance along with his life and any possibility of a free world of choice and intellect. The gun went in his mouth next.

  Maybe he could no longer think, but his finger still knew how to pull the trigger.

  And with what was coming, it was a blessing.

  12:21 P.M.

  At the White House, the human-worm mass flooded into the oval office, an undulating living carpet of wriggling bodies and coiling parasites, all knitted together, fused, welded into one, a squirming biological entity that flowed and oozed and rippled. A gurgling, hissing, steaming multiform profusion. Those parts of it which had once been human were naked and oily, contorting bonelessly, threaded like buttons by worms piercing their asses and hanging from their mouths, joining with other worms into a common whole of communal parasitism, an organic soup of flesh and worm and maggoty writhing.

  The President—teeth chattering, sweating, and blood-slicked—watched this new horror enter his life. He stood there, numb and mindless, as the worm sea flooded forward and inundated him up to his hips. He should have gone stark raving mad, but since he was already there, there was nowhere to go but up.

  This…

  This nightmare…

  This abomination…

  This grotesque aberration…

  It has not come to eat me, but to seek my learned counsel…

  He spit. He stammered. Bile ran from his mouth. His own worm spiraled with great excitement inside him. This, it said to him without saying
a word. Yes, this, this, and this.

  The mass shivered around him, worms playing over his belly and hips. They were questing, greasy fingers that embraced him, imparting biochemical secretions into his skin where they were absorbed by ducts, translated by his own parasite which flooded him with pleasing, addicting endorphins which calmed him, pacified him, made him look out over the sea of worms and worm forms as he had once looked out over his constituents with a loving and just eye.

  The entity seemed pleased. It throbbed and trembled, an immense sculpture of wriggling protoplasm formed into semi-human creeping appendages, crawling worms, millions of looping larva and gushing glossy eggs. It mewled and squeaked. It whispered with the tormented, enslaved voices of men, women, and children, and those mutant hybrid things that were all and neither.

  The President grinned like the madman he was. “THIS IS EMERALD CITY,” he cried, roared, and squealed as drool and an inky foulness ran from his mouth. “I AM OZ THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE…WHY DO YOU SEEK ME?”

  The shivering, amorphous mass rippled, bubbled, then parted like the Red Sea to emit a great, evil, quivering mutation, a pulsating vermiculate monstrosity, a gigantic worm big around as a man’s waist composed of swollen rings bursting with eggs and placental slime. And over its surface, melted into it and mingled with its own flabby tissue, was Maddie Hughes…or that which had once been Maddie Hughes. Her body was stretched over the worm like a hair shirt, over-extended and elongated beyond the point of bursting, bones jutting in white staffs, anatomy knotted and disfigured. Her arms dangled as did her legs, still moving, still macabrely animate. Where her breasts should have been, there were five faces that he recognized—General Mason, chairman of the JCS, SecState Arlene Rabin, Bob Pershing of the CIA, Walt Sleshing of the DIA, and Gordon Parks of the NSA—pulled like taffy into exaggerated fright masks with gaping eye holes and yawning black mouths.