by S A Gardner
Oh, shut up! What a time for my Damian-forever voice to resume its unquestioning decrees.
Distressing thing was, it was in agreement with all other voices, too. I believed him. Regret suffocated me for having jumped down his throat.
Which was irrelevant now. Our only source of info was no more. God—what a time for a rival faction to wipe them out. Couldn’t they have waited until we were finished with them?
I approached the nearest three bodies, turned one over with my foot. Two things leapt at me. One, his stiffness. Rigor mortis was at its height. With the cold temperatures of the past couple of days and the exposure, this put time of death in the past twenty-four hours. Two, his injuries. Several, severe. The killer one had to be the neck’s. No gunshots. This man had been shredded to pieces, tooth and nail. Literally.
“Your bodies ripped apart, too?” That was Savannah.
I turned. “Yeah. Wouldn’t take blood and tissues all over their teeth and fingers to know how they died.”
“Shades of Dawn of the Living Dead,” Al groaned.
“The dead Dead. Thankfully. On all counts,” Char retorted. “So the agent got them, too.”
Damian walked back to us, not looking at me. Just as long as he didn’t pout!
“Let’s clear out, people.”
My hands found my hips. “We’re searching the place first.”
He looked at me now, hard as a blow. “For what? A quick infection?”
“We may already be infected just standing this close to them—just being here.” Savannah shuddered.
Char shook her head. “I don’t think so. Don’t even think HazMat protocols are needed. If this is the same agent—and I bet it is—we have no reason to believe they’re infectious.”
I turned, walked away. “Spread out. Take inventory, check for survivors. Don’t hesitate to shoot any perceived threat.”
In twenty minutes, we reconvened where we’d started. We collated numbers from each checked area. Five hundred and ten. The exact number I’d counted on our first visit. Some had been shot, but most were ripped apart. But it was those who’d been found dead in hiding, without a mark on them, that confused me.
I looked at the others, hoping for insight. “So what have we here, folks—accidental exposure? I mean, we all assumed those thugs were the ones dispensing the agent. If so, what could have happened to make them get a taste of their own fatal medicine?”
“Maybe they were being used all along,” Rafael said. “Maybe whoever was using them decided their roles were over.”
Possible. “Still—stuff here doesn’t add up. The earlier exposures were limited, slower. Now we have a hundred percent fatality rate over the considerable area of the camp. And brute-healthy men dead without a mark on them, in under forty-eight hours.”
Char cleared her throat. “As for the scope, it’s either airborne or waterborne. I favor water here. They get their supplies in tanks, everybody drinks and—voila. As for virulence, maybe it’s an upgrade, or a bigger dose. Probably both.”
“Still seems directly contractable and noninfective,” Di added. “Since we all were in contact with them for their ultra-short incubation period and none of us even has a headache.”
My fists pressed my temples. “I’m way beyond headaches, Di.”
Al gave an unsettled chuckle. “On the flipside, we could be all wrong, and we’d start falling one after the other, or tearing at each other. All the more reason to rush!”
Char straightened from her slouching stance to her full height. “Okay. These are the questions we need answered. If it is not the same agent, how many agents are there, and are all produced by the same operation? Or are there many now, using the same technology but with their own twists? Most importantly, which one were our people exposed to?”
I turned to Damian. “Can you tap your sources on this?”
Damian’s eyebrows shot up. “You talking to me? You rubbing my lamp?” His teasing hit right behind my sternum. He wasn’t angry. Oh, thank you. “I’ll get on it.”
“Uh, people…” Rafael. Something in his voice. I swung around, found him standing by a Jeep. “Got a live one here. We may get answers after all.”
“This one isn’t participating in any Q&A anytime soon.” Al finished gaining central venous access in our patient’s neck.
Tell me about it. The boy—and he was only a boy, no more than fifteen—had been conscious, could talk when Rafael found him. He wasn’t by the time we’d hauled him over to the STS to initiate resuscitation. And his coma was deepening. Fast.
His clinical picture and CTs were dismal. We’d intubated him, started him on antivirals, antibiotics, anticonvulsants and anti-inflammatories, implemented every ICP-reducing measure. I’d even installed an intraventricular catheter through a burr-hole, but it wasn’t making much of a difference to the malignant rise in ICP. Had to be the far more acute course of infection.
The others were hard at work analyzing his CSF, but what we really needed was a brain-tissue sample. Someone at the height of infection with a more virulent strain, or a more concentrated dose—that was what we needed to reach a diagnosis.
But if inflammation was so severe that subarachnoid hemorrhage was starting, an invasive procedure could finish him. Still, we had to go in with a craniotomy, to drain the hemorrhage, to try to stop it, or he was dead anyway. Yeah, but draining his hemorrhage and dipping into his brain for samples weren’t the same, were they?
I could be just talking myself into sacrificing him to get my hands on bits of his brain.
Everyone was waiting for my decision.
I snatched off my mask, ran out of the STS. Needed a minute. Air. Escape. All I found was Damian, leaning against his Jeep, waiting.
He unfolded his arms, approached me. “I got your info. It’s one operation, the same one we’re after. And it’s one product—so far. Just one with variants. No signs of a stockpile here. Probably cleared after the massacre.”
So all we had were dead bodies pumped full of the agent. And one live sample-provider, a boy who’d been snatched from his mother and forced into a life of debasement and atrocity. He lay waiting for me to decide to sacrifice him for the greater good. I blurted it all out to Damian
Just letting off steam, or do you want my opinion?” I opened my mouth. He just pressed on. “Here it is anyway. You can wait for him to die, and he will die no matter what you do, then obtain your samples. But they won’t be as sensitive. Do it now, and your intervention may kill him outright. But it will provide answers. The answers you need to save your friends.”
Our eyes locked. He left me no place to hide.
I ran for one, jumped back into the STS. Before I was out of his earshot, I hurled over my shoulder, “Have I told you lately how I hate people who make sense all the time?”
“Dammit—will you look at that!” Al exclaimed. “What did Char and Di say in their forensic report? That the brain looked cooked? This one looks like it’s been dropped in boiling water.”
“Takes a man who’s never cooked to say that.” Savannah adjusted the computer-assisted magnetic resonance imaging directing my stereotactic, three-dimensional probing needle inside the brain. “If it were, it would turn all pasty-colored and dull, not angry-looking and bloody like that.”
I let out a trembling exhalation before it burst my lungs. “While it’s fun to discuss cooking brains, I would appreciate more suction and a better focus, guys.”
They complied in silence, didn’t talk again until I’d obtained the biopsy—and done a lot of damage while at it, although less than I’d expected. I’d expected to kill him the moment my needle penetrated his brain. Not that I was optimistic about his prognosis. He wouldn’t last much longer.
Please, let it be worth it.
“Hot damn, guys, it’s priceless!” Char swung around as our team entered the ML en masse in answer to her and Di’s summons. Elation was splitting her face wide open. “No wonder we’ve been stumbling over ourselves. This
is just ingenious!”
She’d found it. The answer.
Hope and dread mixed inside me. I could only wheeze, “Great to see you value evil genius so much, Char. Now spill!”
“You want to know why they had all those contradictory symptoms? Because it is neither a biological nor a chemical agent. It’s both!”
Twenty-Eight
“Can you believe it?”
I stared at Char. We all stared at Char.
Hers was a rhetorical question. I knew that. But all I could think was: No, I can’t. How could it possibly be both?
But she seemed certain as she elaborated enthusiastically, with more questions that were actually questions,“And you know how it’s both? And why all that didn’t show up in CSF, blood or urine?”
Unable to contain her excitement, too, Di blurted out, “I tell you, the sheer malicious brilliance of it all. We never would have found out in a hundred years, if not for all the obscure, underground research stuff Rafael unearthed for us.”
When both exchanged excited looks and two more seconds passed without an actual explanation, I raised my hands, feeling my head about to burst. “Guys, no more prologues and suspense. Just tell us, already.”
Di turned to me, her face practically lighting up with elation. “You know why we never found any trace of the agents, yes, in the plural, both chemical and biological, in any of your tests, Cali? Because they were delivered by biomatrix nano-capsules designed in a small enough size to cross the blood-brain barrier….” She turned to Damian and Rafael, explaining the term. “That’s sort of a filter that protects the brain and spinal cord from infiltration by molecules above a certain size.”
Unable to wait, Char jumped in again. “Those capsules are designed to chemically react only within the brain cells’ environment. Once there—and here’s the sheer bloody genius of the design—they conglomerate, so it’s impossible for them to pass out again, therefore defying detection except by direct, live brain biopsy. And even then, on first and second appraisal, as it happened with us, looking very much like a normal polysaccharide molecule! It took the highest suspicion index, and the extensive networked knowledge Rafael put at our fingertips, to suspect the innocent-looking Trojan horses!”
Di jumped back in, even more excited, all but hopping in place. “Once we broke that code, we found two types of biomatrixes, one with traces of the chemical agent, one the biological. We even postulate they are further subdivided into slow-, intermediate-and fast-release subtypes, like in drug vehicles, explaining the discrepancy in onset of disease in people infected at the same time.”
Savannah raised her hand to get a word in. “So it’s designed to dissolve inside brain cells at predetermined speeds, chemical-agent-bearing ones first, producing attacks of violence and hallucinations, followed by the second line of attack, when the virus is released directly into its target organ’s cells.”
Di shook her head vigorously. “Actually, the biological-agent-bearing biomatrix dissolves first, if we allow for incubation period.”
Al whistled. “Twisted. But why don’t the agents, chemical and biological, make it out into the blood and CSF once they’re out of their biomatrix?”
“That’s what the conglomeration does,” Di said. “Blocks permeability from brain cells! And that’s what makes the victims noninfectious. No transfer to bodily fluids, no chance of infection except by direct tissue transfer.”
Silence followed her last words. Long and loud. Everyone struggling to wrap their minds around the diabolical construct/concept.
Savannah finally exhaled. “I can barely imagine it.”
Char flung her arms wide, her grin almost dreamy. “Then imagine the towering genius who not only designed it, but made it work!”
Ben gave a harsh laugh. “You sound in love—both of you!”
“Well, you have to appreciate something of that complexity and ingenuity,” Char said defensively, before her face split wide on glee again. “And if you’re like us, and you think you know all there is to know in your field and then get hit by something like that—I mean, wowee!”
“What about dispersion?” I asked, finally finding my voice again amid the debris of realizations filling my mind. “Why doesn’t the agent linger in an infected area, like the ‘persistent’ anthrax?”
Char turned to me. “No one said it wouldn’t, Cali. That’s what makes it so versatile. Put it in water or food and you’d have your basic surgical strike, affecting only those you target, and not risking infecting others. Disperse it in air and infect everyone within breathing distance—probably until a designed dissolution time.”
Lucia pressed her eyes. “So it’s attack on all fronts, confound diagnosis and make treatment impossible.”
Damian spoke for the first time. “Or just not feasible.”
A moment of silence greeted his words. Seemed no one got what he meant. Starting with me.
What had he meant?
Not important now. Had to convey our findings back home. The trio of Char, Di and Rafael probably surpassed even Damian’s and Sir Ashton’s fancy specialists put together.
I turned to Rafael. He got my unspoken urging, gave my arm a tiny squeeze and rushed out. I watched him leave, something nagging at me.
Then it hit. I swung back to Char and Di. “Hey—you didn’t tell us what the agents are!”
Di giggled. “Oops. Silly us. The chemical agent is a new, and I’d say more potent cross between the incapacitating agents 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate—BZ—and Agent 15. I bet it’s far more potent than both put together. The biological agent looks like a vicious variant of the Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus. At least the viciousness is explained by having it bypass all the body’s defense mechanisms, reaching its optimum site of replication directly in huge concentrations. I’d say it raises the mortality rate from the usual twenty to one hundred percent.”
That was it? What my friends had? The answer?
That didn’t explain the first sympathetic toxidrome. But something like BZ and Agent 15 accounted for the parasympathetic toxidrome. VEE explained the encephalitis—but, oh God—such a direct, focused invasion!
Even if they survived, the possible catastrophic neurological sequels! I’d been fooling myself into thinking a diagnosis would make all the difference.
It probably would. Just not to Matt—to Ayesha…
“Hey, Cali, won’t you go to see what Rafael wants?”
Something on my shoulder shook me. Di’s hand. My eyes refocused. On one of our guards. In the ML’s vestibule. Looking expectant. They’d been talking to me. Telling me something. About Rafael.
“Uh—you want me to tell Rafael you’ll come later?” the guard said, looking warily at me. What did he see on my face that worried him so much?
Time was interrupted, clipping out the section when I must have answered the guard, made the trip to Rafael’s truck.
I found myself panting, staring at Rafael sitting at his workstation near the driver’s compartment. His urgent gesture sped up my rush toward him.
“Your homebound team just came through. Just a sec, I’ll print it all out for you.”
Warping moments later, he handed me the first of many pages. Tears and tremors merged values and figures and tests. Concentrate, dammit. Get a grip.
Moment of truth.
I subsided on one of the benches, smeared the offending moisture from my eyes, scrunched my brains.
All tests validated Char’s and Di’s diagnosis. The biomatrix delivery system, the double whammy of chemical–biological affliction. One difference, though. A bonus agent, methamphetamine-like, explaining the first sympathetic toxidrome, making diagnosing Matt and the others even more impossible than the rest.
This had to have been engineered. The differences couldn’t have been haphazard. Why only them? To what end?
Then I read the verdict of the reports. The first light in the dark realm I’d stumbled into since Matt held that perforator.
No
w they understood the agent’s mechanism, experts were certain it was survivable. If the victim was maintained as vigorously as my friends had been in the first week.
After that period it seemed that the conglomeration of the biomatrix, having achieved its purpose of killing the victim, dissolved. If it happened while the victim was still alive, as it was beginning to happen in my friends’ cases, it was released into the CSF.
Not that it was clear sailing now. A brand-new problem had arisen, just an hour before this last contact. Impaired CSF circulation and excretion due to inflammation led to percolation of the agents where they continued to do damage.
But that they were handling. They said. Their game plan to stop the agents’ vicious cycle was to both administer specific treatments and antidotes, and drain the infected CSF, gradually letting freshly formed fluid replace it.
The report ended with the belief that our immediate and extensive intervention had ameliorated the pathological process, which, in conjunction with current procedures, offer hope for minor central nervous system damage.
More invasive procedures, more gambles. More uncertainty.
Oh, Matt—Ayesha. All of them. God.
At least they’d live. I had to hang on to that. Whatever damage they had, we’d get through it together. At least now we knew this was survivable….
Which didn’t make much of a difference really. Not in case of a massive attack. No health-care system could sustain the level of critical care that had been given to my friends.
Just not feasible.
Now I understood what Damian had said. Ever the logistician.
He’d seen what none of us had, as we’d scrambled over scientific details. The big picture. The sheer logistical impossibility of counteracting such a disaster.
Whoever designed this knew. That sustaining massive numbers of victims long enough for the biomatrix to degrade, compounded by the intricate method of ridding them of the agent, would be a far more taxing catastrophe than the plague.