Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  There was no sign of movement inside the fence, no cars in the lone swatch of parking lot they could see. The place looked abandoned, yet none of them believed it for a second.

  Wolfe carried an acetylene blowtorch the size of a flashlight. The plan was for Hawthorne and Carver to cover him long enough to cut through the chain link, then all file through. Marshall had said the GPS showed the cell phone signal in the vicinity of the second and third white domes, so they would have to clear them above ground before backtracking to the underground access by the water reclamation ponds to clear them from below. It was a lengthy process that would leave them separated and exposed, but the only other option was to stick together, which would take three times as long and make them an easier target collectively. This was how it had to be done. They would just need to be exceptionally wary of the entrances to the tunnels from the front and back while underground.

  None of them vocalized what they expected to find inside.

  On Hawthorne's mark, Carver dashed out from the cover of the trees, heading toward a clump of ferns just tall enough for him to dive under. Flat on his chest, he trained the pistol at the fence, fearing even to blink. Hawthorne darted from his peripheral vision and disappeared into another cluster of ferns. Wolfe blew past between them, holding to the cover of a juniper shrub just long enough to ensure no one inside was going to fire at him, then raced up to the fence. Carver saw the focused flame and the orange glow of melting metal, and approached the fence more slowly, gun raised before him, finger tight on the trigger in preparation of shooting anything that so much as flinched. Hawthorne was to his right, walking in the exact same fashion.

  Droplets of flaming aluminum dripped from the fence, smoldering on the damp grass.

  By the time they reached Wolfe, he was on his knees finishing the job. He stepped back and Hawthorne wrenched the flimsy fence away from the post. Carver pushed through the gap, followed by Wolfe, who had traded the torch for his sidearm. There was a clatter behind them as the fence fell back into place. Hawthorne walked backwards behind them, covering their tail in case anyone tried to outflank them.

  There was no movement of any kind. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath. The back of the main building was lifeless, the windows as dark as the eyes of the dead. They crossed into the shadow of the first domed structure and passed the entryway. The door was closed, but through the partially fogged inset window, they caught a brief glimpse of a concrete channel down the middle, the floor damp, the air within golden as though housing a miniature sun. The whole building thrummed with the massive amounts of water being pumped through the tanks.

  A cement path separated the buildings, a sidewalk that stretched all the way back to the burbling green ponds, marred only by large green utility boxes.

  When they reached the second building, Carver braced himself beside the door with his back to the outer fiberglass wall, and waited for the other men to assume their positions. Wolfe stopped at the path between the buildings and Hawthorne continued until he reached the door to the third. Carver drew a deep breath, and swung around to face the door. He caught just a peek at the empty concrete corridor through the glass before throwing the door inward and entering at a crouch. The cement trench was five feet wide and continued all the way to a door at the far end of the building without any gaps to either side, the walls beside him just tall enough that he couldn't quite see over the top. A half dozen iron ladders were affixed to the concrete. He scaled the closest and stood on top of the wall. To the left, water as far as he could see, minus concrete segments dividing it into eight tanks. Sodium halide bulbs hung from the fiberglass roof in silver cones, directed down at the surface of the water, the kind of lights they used at football stadiums for night games. There were pipes and hoses everywhere, agitating the water's surface from one side and skimming it from the other. The insides of the tanks were lined with some sort of black rubber coating, making the bottom appear to terminate in shadows while a glare reflected from the surface.

  There had to be hundreds of fish in the tank beside him alone, a chaos of scales flashing past in opposite directions, darting to and fro, never seeming to collide, but rather passing right through each other. He recognized the hooked mouth and the hint of red of the Chinook salmon, and continued walking along the ledge. From this vantage, he could clearly see there was no one else in the building, unless they were hiding under the water. If that were the case, then he would never see them through the frenzied fish, even from directly above. Each of the tanks appeared to be the same size and contained the same species of fish, until he reached the halfway point and saw a strange phenomenon ahead. The back three sections to either side bubbled like hot tubs, and yet there was no steam. He was nearly on top of them before he understood. What he had mistaken for bubbles were actually the mouths of hundreds of fish opening and closing as they gulped the outside air. Long, slender brown bodies with dorsal fins that nearly ran the length of their bodies, wriggling around and on top of each other like pits full of snakes.

  Carver nearly lost his balance at the sight of them.

  Here he was within inches of the gene-altering retrovirus and there was nothing he could do about it. He could have emptied both magazines into the tank and not made a dent in the staggering population. The worst part was that the snakeheads couldn't have looked more innocuous. Ugly, broad-nosed things that appeared to have been clubbed over the top of the face, but harmless nonetheless.

  And within them was the reason that Ashlee Porter, Jessica Fenton, Angela Downing, and Jasmine Rivers had been bled to death and chopped to pieces, the reason eleven bodies were mummified in the Arizona desert, the reason that forty million lives would soon be irrevocably changed forever.

  No. Not yet. All they had to do was prevent thousands of hospitals and clinics from distributing the vaccine and track down the potentially tens of thousands who had already used it. The task was daunting, but feasible. They were just running out of time.

  He steadily walked to the end, glancing back over his shoulder every third step, and descended the ladder to the ground. One final scan behind him and he was out the door. Hawthorne and Wolfe were already on the move in his direction. He could tell by Hawthorne's expression that there were more snakeheads in the other dome as well.

  The foul, marshy stench from the closest pond assaulted them as they closed in on the brick building. Green flora floated on water that looked more like sewage. The ground vibrated underfoot and the sound of water through pipes was like thunder. Wolfe again readied the blowtorch in anticipation of bypassing a lock, but there was no padlock and the door opened easily inward.

  Machinery banged all around them in the dark room. The light from the outside world only reached far enough inside to vaguely illuminate the pressure gauges and digital readouts on the walls. Iron railings enclosed a cement staircase leading downward. Carver clicked on his penlight and held it along the sightline of his Beretta. He took the lead, stepping around the railing and descending into the blackness that seemed to squeeze his light to a pinprick.

  A flash of memory: easing down nearly identical steps into a cellar under a barn less than forty-eight hours prior. Only this time, the sulfurous scent from above prevented him from smelling potential death below.

  At the bottom of the staircase, a hallway stretched to infinity, so far that the light faded out long before encountering anything solid. It was just as Kajika had described it: pipes as thick as his thighs ran along the walls to either side, one on top of the other from the floor to the ceiling, bolted in place. Smaller silver pipes covered the ceiling, presumably concealing the power cables.

  There was the occasional sound of dripping water. Even their gently placed tread slapped the condensation on the floor. The putrid aroma faded, replaced by the damp, mildewy smell of a cellar after heavy rain. Carver's skin dampened with humidity, forcing him to readjust his grip on the gun.

  A small branch opened from the tunnel to the right. Carver turned
his flashlight to inspect it and caught a blinding reflection. There were three-tiered racks to either side and one at the back. All of the shelves were completely stuffed with long silver canisters. The exact same kind they had found in the killer's house in Arizona. There had to be hundreds of them. They'd been shipping the blood here the entire time, testing it, waiting for the perfect retrovirus to infect the tanks brimming with the right kind of fish.

  Hawthorne tugged on his sleeve and he stepped back into the main corridor. After twenty yards, they reached a perpendicular tunnel, presenting the option of continuing straight ahead under the third dome, or turning left or right to reach the others.

  The sound of their breathing grew harsher at the prospect of separating. Even together, their small lights barely allowed them to see one another, let alone fifteen feet ahead. Carver turned to debate their options and his light reflected from twin golden rings. Eyes. Wolfe had removed his sunglasses.

  "The phone's straight ahead," Wolfe whispered.

  "How can you be sure?" Carver asked.

  "I can see it." There was something in Wolfe's voice that made the hairs on Carver's arms stand on end.

  Carver turned and headed deeper into the tunnel. He darted across the intersection. Had he stopped to shine his light one way and then the other, he might as well have painted a glowing bull's eye on his forehead.

  It was several moments before he heard the sound of their hesitant footsteps behind him.

  Another half dozen steps and he saw why.

  II

  Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory

  Centennial, Colorado

  Marshall had been on the phone with a nurse named Courtney at Denver General before he had even hung up with Carver. She had initially balked at giving him one of their limited stock of flu vaccines, implying there was nothing official about his inquiry and that he simply wanted to cut in front of the deluge of patients they expected the following morning. He wasn't prepared to discuss any of the details regarding his request with her. Fortunately, in the end he hadn't been forced to divulge anything. The promise of three large pizzas delivered to the emergency room at dinnertime had procured a lone sample of the nasal inhalant. For the sake of expedience, a call to the Centennial Police Department had guaranteed the vaccine would be in his hands in no time flat. All that had cost him was future considerations, which probably meant bumping some officers to the top of the waiting list for their specialized training programs. Easy enough. So he would be out forty bucks and a little integrity he'd hardly miss. Big deal.

  The four interns had been thrilled at the prospect of doing something a little more challenging than preparing semen and fiber samples, and running his errands for him. Under normal circumstances, he would have reveled in teasing them with the value of the work and then sending them out to launder the lab coats, but time was of the essence. And he had to admit they had actually done a pretty good job. Maybe he'd even throw them a bone and tell them as much.

  Extracting the viruses hadn't proven much of a challenge. He just hadn't been prepared to find so many. There were three distinct strains of Influenza A: H1, H3N2, and H7N2; and two of Influenza B: variants of the Shanghai and Victoria strains. Delineating one from the next by hemagglutinin and neuraminidase morphology had been a painstaking process. By the end, they had examined nearly every single drop of fluid and the enthusiasm had long since vanished. All they had found were dead flu viruses. One after another after another, until finally something completely different appeared on the slide of the female intern who had spit in his coffee. Just a little twitch of movement had caught her eye, a lone living virus in a sea of dead ones, and they had it.

  There was the cause of so much death.

  The snakehead retrovirus.

  Marshall now sat at his computer comparing the structure of the unaltered virus from the database to that of the one they had found in the vaccine. The interns leaned over his shoulder, salivating at the prospect of publishing their findings and making a name for themselves. Little did they know that if they were able to prevent the release of the vaccine, no one would ever be allowed to know how close the world had come to catastrophe. The average person preferred not to know such niggling details.

  There they were: the modified Gag protein, the lentivirus-like Env, the triple icasohedral arrangement. It was truly a work of art, like painting the Mona Lisa on the head of a pin. Marshall could only stare in awe. This was the culmination of experimentation that had begun nearly seventy years ago, before there was even color television. And now with this single viral organism, millions of years of human evolution could be accelerated in the time it took to sniff.

  He would have felt more comfortable juggling nuclear warheads.

  Were it not for the fact that it was now evidence, he would have taken great joy in holding the slide over a Bunsen burner and watching the sucker fry.

  He dialed Carver's cell phone, but there was no answer, so he left the message he had prayed he would be able to. He tried Manning next. She sounded every bit as excited as he felt. In his hurry, he missed the opportunity to ask her out. A mistake he would rectify as soon as this was all over. The following calls were going to be more involved, the conversations much longer. He was going to have to convince both the FBI and CDC that the vaccine needed to be pulled from all across the free world in a matter of hours and they would have to mobilize every available body to accomplish this feat. But he would do it. It was just going to require some more caffeine.

  Leaning forward, he extricated his wallet from the pocket of his lab jacket and turned to the intern who had flavored his coffee and done God only knew what to his skillet meal.

  "I need a favor." She sighed and closed her eyes. Before she could vent her obvious frustration, he handed her his wallet. "Go get me another mochaccino."

  She stared at the wallet and shook her head.

  "And why don't you grab some for everyone. My treat. You guys earned them."

  She might even have smiled when she took his wallet, but Marshall had already turned away and was dialing the phone, preparing to convince the most skeptical human beings on the planet that forty million people were going to be exposed to a rare fish retrovirus that would modify their chromosomes to contain animal genes if they didn't pull the flu vaccine that very night. Either that, or the next generation would be venomous children who could see in the dark and hunt for days at a time without sleeping.

  He was going to need all the luck he could get.

  III

  Redmond, Washington

  The tunnel seemed to close in around him, the thrum of the water through the pipes was like the pulse of some great beast. Directly in front of them was what they had expected to find, though none of them had spoken the words out loud. Carver had to turn away to compose himself. The flashlight shined from the wide black puddle on the concrete. It hadn't been a bloodletting. It had been a slaughter.

  Footsteps closed in behind him and stopped. Hawthorne's flashlight shined over his shoulder, illuminating the carnage in the corner of his eye. He had to turn back, had to know.

  "They left the body where they knew we would find it," Hawthorne said. "This was a setup to slow us down. They're long gone."

  "And we have no idea where they are now," Wolfe said.

  Carver steeled himself and directed his light over the remains heaped on the floor. Everything was so wet with blood that it was hard to determine at first exactly what was what. The lower legs were crumpled under the body, the back arched to showcase what little remained of the thorax, the arms sprawled out to either side. Fractured ribs poked out of the chest. The cavity was so bloody it was hard to tell fabric from flesh. The abdomen had been roughly opened and folds of bowel had squeezed out over the waistband of the tattered pants.

  "We did this to him,"' Carver said. "We should never have left them behind."

  He shined the beam upward. The silver pipes were bowed downward, stripped of the grime and f
lakes of rust that coated the rest of their length.

  "They hung him up there," Carver said, lowering the light to finally look at the face. The belt was still tight around the neck, the buckle reflecting the beam, the remainder trailing across the floor parallel to the long black braid. Kajika's face was swollen and covered with blood, his mouth parted from the force of the makeshift noose under his jaw, eyes rolled upward beneath half-closed lids. "Just strung him up and butchered him."

  The top of Locke's phone stood from the open chest like an impromptu tombstone.

  They should never have involved Kajika, never dragged him across the country to use him for his knowledge of HydroGen, where he had helped lay the first brick above them and now lay dead below. But they hadn't brought Kajika into this mess in the first place. His participation had been preordained the moment he and Schwartz developed the viral protein coat. Maybe it had been Schwartz who had started him down this road, and whose death had guaranteed his own. In the end, it simply boiled down to the fact that Kajika knew too much and needed to be eliminated. It was a tragic waste of a brilliant mind and a genuinely kind soul, especially if Marshall was able to convince the powers that be to stop the distribution of the vaccine to the general population.

  Carver turned to see the glimmer of tears on Wolfe's cheeks before he quickly wiped them away. Wolfe's eyes narrowed to crescent moons. His lips writhed over bared teeth.

  Hawthorne walked past Carver and carefully extracted Locke's cell phone without stepping in the blood. He shoved it into the interior pocket of his jacket.

  "I'd say he hasn't been dead more than an hour tops," Hawthorne said.