Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  He removed some paper-towel wadding, and then pulled out the two cobra boxes. They looked exactly alike. The only visible difference between them was the different paper labels glued to their bases. Once the boxes were out in the air, the Core had officially gone hot.

  He put the boxes on the table and wrote the word COBRA on a couple of evidence tags. Then he dated the tags and wrote down the laboratory control number of the Reachdeep lab (every evidence lab is assigned a number in the F.B.I.). The sample numbers were 1 and 2.

  'I've been thinking about something, Will,' Littleberry said. 'Whoever made those boxes used a lab setup much like this one. Somewhere in this city there's another lab, another Core. And it's running hot, like this one.'

  'I like your concept, Commander Littleberry,' Hopkins said. 'It's an Anti-Core. The Anti-Core is out there. And these little things' - he indicated the cobra boxes - 'are going to lead us to it.'

  By putting the elements of the forensic investigation together in one place, in a forward field deployment, with living quarters nearby, with an operations group ready, Will Hopkins believed - hoped - that the investigation . could be speeded up and run to a quick conclusion. The idea was to compress a universal forensic operation into a continuous, silent, catlike movement at high speed, culminating in an accelerative explosive rush. The quarry should not know where the hunter was moving. The quarry should not even know that there was a hunter. ,

  Insectary MANHATTAN, SUNDAY

  Archimedes lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor. He kept the shades drawn at all times. The shades were lined with metal foil, to block the sunlight and also to keep snooping eyes from looking into his laboratory with heat-sensing cameras. There were times when he thought he was being watched. At other times he thought he must be paranoid.

  He had to keep the apartment dark. He could not allow direct sunlight to enter the laboratory, because sunlight might destroy his virus cultures. He was eating lunch now, in the kitchen. His lunch was a frozen vegetarian burrito, with a tortilla that was free of animal fats. He did not eat meat. He was a parasite on the plant kingdom, but we all have to eat. The problem is that too many humans have to eat. He stood up and opened a door that led to a hallway. The hallway was his Biosafety Level 2 staging area.

  In the staging area, he kept a plastic tub full of water and laundry bleach. That was for washing - deconning - objects that were contaminated. There were also some cardboard boxes holding biosafety equipment that he had ordered through the mail from an 800 number. He had his equipment sent to a mail service in New Jersey. Then he drove out and picked up the things in his car. He pulled a clean Tyvek suit out of a box and put it on.

  Tyvek was not a natural fiber, but it was necessary to wear around the brainpox virus or you would get infected pretty quickly. He had been around brainpox for a long time and had never become infected. He was careful. He had also come to believe that he might very well be one of the people who, for some reason, were less susceptible to infection by brainpox. He put on double latex rubber gloves, a head covering, surgical booties, and a full-face respirator mask. Then he opened the door to Level 3.

  He entered the bedroom and shut the door behind him.

  His weapons lab was a comfortable working environ­ment. There were some old Formica tables he had bought at a flea market. It was the flea market where he had traded the box to the woman who had tried to cheat him. He had enlisted her in the human experimental trials. Afterward, he had scanned the newspapers and watched the television news, but nothing about her was mentioned. Also in his lab there was a bioreactor, which was humming away softly, and the virus-drying trays, and the insectary.

  The laboratory was situated in the back of his building. He had installed an air-filter system, a quiet little fan, set in a window. It had a HEPA filter. It pulled air out of the Level 3 laboratory, passed it through filters, and discharged it outdoors, clean and safe. This created negative air pressure inside his lab, so that no infective particles would escape. Air was drawn into the lab through a little vent in another window. He had sealed the windows with tape. Nothing fancy, but it worked.

  The insectary, which sat on a table, was a colony of moths. He kept the colony for philosophic reasons; he didn't really need it to carry out his work. But it was fun. The insectary was a collection of clear plastic boxes where his moths lived. He pulled open the lid of a box

  and inspected the green caterpillars inside. He dropped in some pieces of lettuce. They ate vegetables. He had planted a few alfalfa plants in the garden next to his building for them to eat; no one even seemed to notice.

  The natural strain of his brainpox virus lived in moths and butterflies. The moth caterpillars crawled around in the boxes eating leaves. They ate until they died. They became paralyzed with the insect strain of his brainpox virus - not the human strain; human brainpox wouldn't grow in insects. The moth caterpillars became listless, but they kept eating. Then, suddenly, the melt occurred. It was a technical term for a virus-triggered meltdown of a creature. It happened in an explosive final wave of virus replication, and in less than two hours the caterpillar was transformed into mostly virus. He under­stood that pretty much the same type of virus amplifica­tion melted the human brain.

  He reached inside the insectary and pulled a dead caterpillar off a leaf. The dead caterpillar had turned into a liquid bag full of glassy, milky ooze. It was 40 percent pure virus crystals by dry weight. It was almost half virus. He squeezed the dead caterpillar and the crystal­line ooze popped out of it. This melt was a fascinating thing to see. The transformational power of a virus never failed to impress him, even when it worked inside caterpillars.

  It was interesting to see how the virus could turn an insect into a bag of virus crystals. The virus could take over its host and keep the host alive - still hungry, still feeding - even while it converted the host's body almost entirely to virus crystals. The virus also stopped the molting process of the insect, so that it never became an adult. It stayed young and ate and ate until it was nothing but crystals. The human strain of the virus could transform the human brain into a bag of virus crystals and make the human eat and eat and eat.

  The human species is hungrier than a hungry insect. With its monstrous, out-of-control appetite, it is ruining the earth, he said to himself. When a species overruns its natural habitat, it devours its available resources. It becomes weakened, vulnerable to infectious outbreaks. A sudden emergence of a deadly pathogen, an infectious killer, reduces the species back to a sustainable level. These mass dyings happen all the time in nature. For example, gypsy moth caterpillars sometimes overrun forests in the northeastern part of the United States; they eat the leaves off the trees. Eventually the population of caterpillars becomes so large that the caterpillars use up their food supply, and then all kinds of viruses break out among the caterpillars. Sooner or later some virus crashes the population of gypsy moths, and for years afterward the trees are relatively free of caterpillars. Viruses play an important role in nature: they keep populations in check.

  Now consider man, he thought.

  Look at the AIDS virus. People go on talking about the depletion of the population because of AIDS, saying what a disaster it is, yet in the next breath they talk about how the environment is being damaged by overpopulation. The fact is that AIDS is an example of the kind of disease corrective that always appears when a population booms out of control. It is necessary. The real problem is that AIDS has not done its work well enough. And what's worse, public health doctors are trying to develop a vaccine for it. ,

  There is no more dangerous human being than a public health doctor, he thought. Public health doctors are largely responsible for the uncontrolled boom in the human population that is destroying the earth. The public health doctors are environmental criminals of the highest degree. Even now they are trying to cause an extinction of a natural species, the extinction of the

  smallpox virus. Smallpox is a beautiful white tiger, and it has a pla
ce in nature. Who are we to presume to destroy a white tiger? The Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth should defend smallpox!

  Natural thinning events are positive. History shows what I mean, he liked to point out in his mind. In the year 1348 or thereabouts, the Black Death, an infective airborne bacterial organism called Yersinia pestis, wiped out at least a third of the population of Europe. It was a very good thing for Europe. The survivors prospered. They inherited more land and more property. A great economic boom followed the Black Death, and it culmi­nated in the Renaissance. In the wake of the mass dying, the survivors were richer and had more to eat. There were fewer poor people crowded into the towns, because so many of the poor had died. With the numbers of poor reduced, a labor shortage developed in the towns during the years following the Black Death. New machines and new manufacturing processes were invented to make up for the loss of unskilled laborers. This led to increasingly free capital flow. It led to the creation of the first true investment banks, in Florence and in other cities, and great wealth was created, great art, new ideas. One could say that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel came out of the Black Death.

  Historians describe the Black Death as something that just 'occurred' at the end of the Middle Ages. They don't make the connection: the Black Death did. not just 'occur'; it was the biological event that ended the Middle Ages. And the world is overdue for another biological event. If it doesn't happen soon, how many species will disappear, how many beautiful tracts of primeval rain forest will vanish forever? If the public health doctors keep up their work, they will practically destroy the world.

  Hence the need for a new disease.

  Brainpox was beautiful. It was a biological rocket that destroyed the central nervous system. Driven by its rocketing proteins, brainpox raced along nerve fibers in the skull. Brainpox transformed the brain into a virus bioreactor. The brain went hot. Brainpox melted the brain in the same way that the natural form of the virus melted insects.

  The brain bioreactor went hot, and it filled up with virus particles until it melted down inside the skull. The reactor began leaking fluids and biting and thrashing and hemorrhaging and generally running out of control, spreading the virus around to other hosts in a messy but effective way. Of course brainpox caused human suffer­ing, but it was over soon. None of this lingering, as with AIDS, no time for public health doctors to find a cure. Brainpox wouldn't harm any other life forms on the planet, because brainpox infects only the human species. It wouldn't affect the ecosystems and habitats of the rain forest.

  He imagined brainpox turning New York City into a hot bioreactor, a simmering cauldron of amplifying virus. From there brainpox would amplify itself outward along invisible lines, following airline routes, spanning the globe. New York was the seed bioreactor, the cooker that would start the other cities going. This was not exactly the revenge of the rain forest; this was the revenge of molecular biology. From New York, brainpox would rocket to London and Tokyo, and it would fly to Lagos, Nigeria, and it would land in Shanghai and Sipgapore, and it would amplify through Calcutta, and it would get to Sao Paulo and Mexico City and Dacca in Bangladesh and Djakarta in Indonesia and all the great supercities of the earth. The cities would go hot, for a while. But it would not be the end of the human species, not in the least. It would merely remove one out of every two persons; or perhaps one out of three persons might

  vanish. Maybe even less. He didn't know exactly. A biological weapon never exterminates a population. It merely thins. The greater the thinning, the healthier the effect on the species that has been thinned.

  He checked on the bioreactor. It was a microreactor called a Biozan. It was running smoothly, the pumps humming gently, making about as much noise as a fishtank. It was making concentrated brainpox virus. The output liquid, saturated with virus particles, ran through a flexible tube to a jar on the floor. As the liquid settled, a white sludge would form on the bottom of the jar. That sludge was mostly virus. He would pour off the liquid from the jar, and the sludge that remained was incredibly concentrated brainpox. He scraped it out with a spoon. It was unbelievable how one little bioreactor could make so much virus.

  Near the bioreactor stood the drying trays. He mixed the virus sludge with a special kind of glass in liquid form. It was rather like making candy. He poured the molten glass into the trays. It dried and hardened into coin-sized hexagons of viral glass.

  He bought the viral glass mix through the mail. It was great stuff. A little pricey, but it seemed to work. With his double-gloved fingertips, he gently picked up a glass hexagon. He enjoyed holding viral glass in his fingers. He could see the rainbow colors of his virus - His thoughtful reverie was interrupted by a squeaking sound, a dry, metallic squeal. He heard voices and then a crash.

  He put the crystal back in the tray. Those kids were being disruptive again.

  He pulled back the metal curtain an inch and looked down. His laboratory overlooked an empty lot that was surrounded by a chain-link fence. People in the neigh­borhood had planted a garden there, with flowers and shrubs (and a little bit of alfalfa, which he had planted).

  They had put in an old swing set and a children's slide and a small rotating merry-go-round. It was made of metal. The large boys were standing on the merry-go­round, pushing it, shouting. They were making it go too fast, and it was squealing again. They were ten or twelve years old, rough-looking city kids. One of them hurled a rock into the fence. Then the rest of them jumped off and went running, throwing rocks.

  At a cat!

  It was a brown and white stray cat, one of the animals that people left tins of food for in the informal park below his window. The cat leaped up the fence, but a rock crashed into the fence, and the cat went to the ground and shot off, more rocks pounding around it, and it twisted and screeched when a rock hit it. And then it ran through a hole under the fence, and escaped.

  It made him angry, but there was nothing he could do, because he was stuck in Level 3.

  Samples GOVERNORS ISLAND

  The city morgue truck was backed in behind the Coast Guard hospital, its rear end facing a hospital loading dock. Inside the truck was a bank of refrigerated crypts. There was also a mortuary gurney on wheels - a pan. The bodies of Peter Talides, Glenn Dudley, and Ben Kly were triple-bagged in white body pouches that were plastered with biohazard symbols. The morgue attend­ants at the O.C.M.E. had splashed large amounts of bleach inside the pouches and around the bodies, to kill the hot agent on the exterior of the bodies.

  Lex Nathanson and Austen suited up in a storage room near the loading dock, a room that Littleberry had designated the autopsy decon room. They wore chain­mail gloves on both hands. When they got in the truck, they started with Glenn Dudley.

  Without removing Dudley from the biohazard pouches, they lifted him by his shoulders and feet out of a crypt. It was a struggle. He was a heavy, muscular man. They transferred his bagged cadaver to the gurney. Nathanson unzipped the bags but did not remove the body. This was going to be a minimal autopsy in a bio­hazard shroud. Dudley's blood and fluids would collect inside the shroud, and would not flow anywhere else.

  No one had removed Dudley's clothing. He was wearing surgical scrubs. His scalp hung down over his

  face, exposing the dome of the skull. Dudley had prepared his cranium for opening.

  Austen lifted up the scalp, and Dudley's eyes came into view. They had developed gold rings in the irises, with flamelike offshoots. She opened his mouth and looked carefully. She found a half-dozen blood blisters, mainly inside the upper cheeks.

  Austen cut his scrubs off with blunt scissors, laying the shirt back, opening the trousers.

  'I spoke with Glenn's wife,' Nathanson said. 'They have three children. The oldest is fifteen. It's the children I think about.'

  'Do they know what happened?' Austen asked him. 'I believe she has told them something but not all of it.' He did the Y incision on Dudley's chest and abdomen, and opened up his chest. He cut Dudley's ribs with loppers,
and removed the sternum plate. He remained ice-calm. Austen watched him with respect. She saw no external sign of emotion.

  'Do you want me to take over, Dr Nathanson?' 'I'm all right.'

  The two pathologists worked carefully. Nathanson did not remove any of Dudley's organ blocks. He and Austen examined the organs in place in his body cavity, and they took biosamples. Removing the organs and section­ing them would splash around a great deal of blood and fluid, and Nathanson felt that the safety risk did not justify the procedure.

  Nathanson wrapped Dudley's head in a clear plastic bag. He plugged in a Stryker saw, then put the saw inside the bag, and tightened the bag with a string around Dudley's throat. The bag would prevent blood and bone dust from flying into the air; it would splash inside the bag. This was standard procedure for opening a biohazardous brain.

  The saw chattered away, spewing wet bone dust and

  bloody material on the inside of the bag until the top of the skull could be removed. Nathanson's mask was now completely misted with sweat. Austen watched him carefully. He appeared to be holding himself under tight but fragile control, but suddenly he said, 'Would you take over now, Dr Austen?'

  She nodded. She snipped open the dura mater - the gray leathery membrane that covers the brain. Dudley's brain resembled that of Kate Moran: glassy, jellylike, swollen, bloated.

  'I splashed a drop of blood in his eyes. It was my fault.' 'Put that out of your mind forever,' Nathanson said. What she could not put out of her mind was her last sight of Ben Kly alive. Kly had given her a chance to escape, and he had done it knowing it might well cost him his life. He had also accompanied her and protected her in the tunnel under Houston Street. He was a city morgue attendant, one of the anonymous handlers of the dead, yet she saw him as a man of perfect courage. The investigation had turned on his help. He left a wife and a small child. Austen felt the unworthiness of a survivor. She could hear Dudley's voice saying, 'You work around it.'