Fires of Midnight

by Jon Land

  “Got my own reasons this time.”

  Only then did Blaine notice the quivery expression that had crossed Crazy Harry Lime’s face. “Keep talking.”

  “You gotta help me. You’re the only one who can. That’s why I took this run. That’s why I had to come get you. Leave you down there in Castro’s shithouse and I’m fucked as bad as you.”

  “Hard to believe, Harry.”

  “It ain’t, trust me. See, Captain, something happened … .”

  TWO

  Susan Lyle had practiced laboratory work in full isolation gear many times. Nothing, though, could prepare her for the autopsies she opted to perform personally upon returning to Atlanta from Cambridge early Monday. Five bodies had been shipped in a refrigerated hold of the CDC jet that was now effectively hers. Normally a pathology specialist would handle this chore and Firewatch had a team that would take over after she had done the preliminary work. But something territorial had taken over Susan. She had trained so long and often in preparation for a crisis event that she was reluctant to delegate any responsibility, especially anything as sensitive as this. Beyond that, there was the danger factor to consider. Both of Firewatch’s pathologists were family men, which in Susan’s mind made the risk of exposure to the Cambridgeside corpses unacceptable for them.

  This event had already made her no stranger to risk. The creature that had flown at her and smashed her faceplate back at the mall was a dog: frantic, terrified and somehow very much alive. The panic she’d felt when the potentially contaminated air rushed in through the shattered plastic had forced the breath to bottleneck in her throat.

  It’s happening. My God, it’s happening to me!

  The dog’s tongue sweeping across her face told her she was okay. She recovered enough of her senses to quiet the animal down and remain inside the mall for another hour until a decontamination unit arrived from one of the CDC’s six regional crisis management centers in Connecticut. She moved about, continuing her laborious trek with an almost maddening calm. Facing death had left her with the feeling she had gotten the upper hand on whatever Biosafety Level 4 hot agent had penetrated the Galleria. It was hiding, it was afraid. The first round had gone to her.

  The autopsies formed the second. Accessing the isolation wing where the bodies were waiting meant first passing through several preparatory stages required to insure maximum protection. She was showered with both water and chemicals, air dried, wind blasted, powdered and dressed in several layers of protective clothing that would all be burned at the conclusion of her work.

  Susan thought she’d be ready when the time came to enter the wing, but the tension she felt made her heavy gloves bulkier and turned her space suit into an oven. Instead of being outfitted with a portable air supply, this suit took its air from a hose snaking from the wall to a slot custom-tailored for its nozzle. The hose followed her like a chain wherever she went. Every breath quickly became an effort and her faceplate kept misting up until she calmed herself down.

  The sights she recorded through that faceplate as she began the first of the autopsies were clear enough, though. Her scalpel cut the flesh down the center of the torso like crinkled cardboard. In years past, the use of scalpels or any sharp cutting instrument was strictly forbidden in the presence of a suspected Level 4 agent, since slicing through a glove or sleeve meant possible infection and even death. But the space suits used by the Firewatch team had been outfitted with gloves and sleeves reinforced with a thinner weave of the same Kevlar material used for bulletproof vests.

  As had been the case in the mall, Susan’s helmet was outfitted with a microphone to record her observations. All she had to do was speak.

  “This body is a male thirty-one years of age. Weight according to recovered identification eighty-one kilograms. Weight upon arrival at lab thirty-five kilograms. Height according to recovered identification one hundred sixty-two centimeters. Height upon arrival one hundred twenty-nine centimeters.”

  She touched the rib cage and found the bones had taken on a puttylike consistency. Parting the ribs was as simple as pulling them back with her hands and affixing a clamp on either side, revealing the vital organs.

  “Vital organs all intact but in the same dehydrated condition as the skin. Proceeding with inspection …”

  Susan cut the heart out first. It fit easily in her gloved palm, reduced in scope and appearance to a baseball-sized prune, dry enough to resemble a balled-up piece of paper. She placed it in the digital scale eye level before her.

  “Weight of heart one fifth of normal, confirming that loss of hemoglobin extended to muscle and vital organs as well as flesh. Condition of the skeletal system is similarly withered.”

  Susan grabbed a microscope slide from the ample supply resting on the table next to her and centered a fragment of bone upon it. Then she took it to the electron microscope and quickly located what she was looking for.

  “Entire capillary system running through the sternum has collapsed. No living tissue present whatsoever in terms of stem cells or reproducing blood cells, leading to deterioration and decalcification of the skeletal structure.”

  Susan stopped here and returned to the body lying on the gurney. Strange how the absence of all but the isolation suit’s antiseptic smell lent a dreamlike aura to the scene. She had come to associate the autopsy procedure with many things, scents foremost among them. Now the only thing she could cling to was the process itself, a process that had become almost routine by the time she completed the fifth body, realizing she was in danger of being late for the Firewatch Command meeting she had called. She had neglected to leave sufficient time for the repeat of the decontamination procedures and actually dashed the last stretch of the way to the communication center, after rushing through the process.

  The communication center had no windows and the knobless door sealed after her entry. A computer keyboard and monitor rested atop a single narrow table in the small room’s center, a chair tucked neatly behind it. The wall directly before the desk was made up of eight twenty-seveninch television monitors. Each was connected to the computer’s outputs so Susan could control the picture on each from her keyboard. Using the keyboard she could choose the picture she wanted the participants of the meeting to see, or divide their screens in up to four segments, even superimpose one broadcast picture over another.

  The speaker boxes representing each of the participants enclosed her on both the left and the right, six to a wall placed atop innocuous-looking slate-black digital relay units, identifiable from the number glowing off a small LED screen atop each speaker. The voices that would emerge from those speakers belonged to members of the Firewatch Command control board, whose job it would be to evaluate her report and determine the appropriate response. She had never met a single one in person, although four or five of the voices were familiar to her, their identities placing her in awe of the position in which she had been placed. For the duration of the meeting that was about to take place, Susan effectively had the ear of the entire government.

  Whatever she had been expecting the CDC to be like upon first signing on, this was nothing even close to it. She had come to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out of Duke Medical School, by way of three years’ residency in internal medicine at Brown University in Rhode Island, rejoicing in an assignment most of her contemporaries viewed as sheer drudgery. When pressed on the subject, Susan claimed she found the research process both exciting and exhilarating. Didn’t they stop to think that a doctor’s ability to diagnose and treat was nothing if the proper treatments and cures were not available? Her work in the lab might someday allow her to save more lives in a week than her classmates might in a lifetime. The CDC people believed her. She was very convincing.

  And it was all a lie, her true motivation too secret and painful to explain. She wanted no one to think she was on some obsessive crusade that might blur the clarity of her vision. But “crusade” was exactly the correct term for it.

  Her exp
ertise in the infectious disease field alone led to the CDC finding a position for her. But it was her ability to work with people as both leader and administrator which had accounted for her being chosen for the Firewatch program. Firewatch had grown out of the CDC’s Special Pathogens Branch, which specialized in unknown viruses. But that branch lacked the capacity for quick response, something CDC officials deemed increasingly important with the rapid emergence of viruses and bacteria the world had seldom if ever seen before and was ill equipped to fight. Firewatch got the call when minutes mattered, while a crisis was still unfolding.

  Accordingly, a Firewatch field leader had to be able to interact, had to be able to take charge on scene even as the inevitable number of agendas came into play. She had accepted the position primarily because it offered the most rapid advancement to the area where her true interest—obsession, actually—lay. And if she handled the Cambridge incident well, then perhaps that advancement would come sooner than she had anticipated.

  Susan’s eyes lifted to the camera suspended from the ceiling at the joint in the front and left side wall. The light beneath it changed from red to green, signaling the broadcast was now active.

  “Let’s begin.”

  “I can’t help but notice your face, Doctor,” came a male voice she couldn’t put a name to out of box number five. “The written report you faxed to all of us yesterday was rather vague on the circumstances of your injury.”

  “Purposely so, sir. A dog jumped at me and landed on my helmet. Impact shattered the faceplate. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “Did you say a dog?” asked the voice from box number two, which Susan recognized as belonging to the director of the FBI, Ben Samuelson.

  “Never mind that,” followed a voice from box number one. “My question is how could the dog have possibly been alive?”

  “I’m not sure yet. It would be best for all of you—and me—to follow the events of yesterday in the order they occurred. I’ll answer any of your questions, of course, but many of those answers may come in the natural progression of my report.”

  Standing, Susan worked the keyboard beneath her so that the screens of all the meeting’s participants would be filled with the recording made by her built-in helmet cam the day before. “You are about to see on your monitors what I saw in my trek through the Cambridgeside Galleria yesterday afternoon.”

  Susan relived every step all over again, no less chilled this time than in any of her previous viewings. She had edited out her run-in with the dog and the result was a surreal walking tour through a graveyard gone mad.

  “My God,” said the voice out of speaker nine when Susan had leaned over to scan one of the victims in more detail.

  “I’d like to see that again,” from speaker six.

  “In slow motion, please,” requested a voice she recognized as belonging to Clara Benedict, deputy national security adviser to the president.

  Susan hit four keys in rapid succession. Instantly the tape rewound and began playing again, in slow motion. She’d seen the shot a hundred times now and it still scared her. The body was not so much a body as a slab of dried, virtually petrified flesh. The slow-motion scene started at the head and worked downward, revealing a mouth that seemed to have been swallowed up by skin that had shriveled. The nose looked to have fallen into the skull, while the eyes bulged grotesquely outward since the lids, brows, and cheekbones had receded. The skin was a ghostly white, almost like chalk, with the texture of cracked leather.

  The torso and neck had flattened into a shapeless mass before petrifying. The arms and legs were angular, molten piles of what used to be flesh and bone.

  “We are to assume, then, Doctor, that all the bodies you found inside the mall were in this condition,” proposed speaker four.

  “That is correct.”

  “What is the count of fatalities?” asked the voice out of the sixth box.

  “Approximately seventeen hundred.”

  “And how are we progressing in identifying them?” asked Clara Benedict.

  “At this point, all we can do is use wallet contents to do the job. It’s slow because of the safety precautions involved.”

  “Stop the tape, please,” requested Clara Benedict. And, after Susan had done so, “Dr. Lyle, what exactly are we looking at? What happened?”

  Susan cleared her throat. “They were drained of all hemoglobin. Blood,” she added after a short pause.

  “I hope we’re not talking about vampires here,” snickered another voice she recognized, that of Daniel Starr, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “No, because our examination of the bodies has yet to reveal a single wound in any of the victims through which the blood could have been removed. Add that to the fact that no blood whatsoever was found spilled at the site and we’re talking about something else entirely.”

  “Like what?”

  “Exposure to a foreign organism that ingested every drop present in the mall.”

  “Your initial reports called it a foreign ‘agent,’” noted General Starr. “What changed?”

  “No inorganic agent could possibly be this target-selective.”

  “Are you saying we’re dealing with a virus or a bacteria here?”

  “Very probably, but one that behaves like none ever previously charted.”

  “A bacteria or virus that goes after blood,” General Starr picked up, “and doesn’t stop until it’s ingested every drop.”

  “Not every drop,” Clara Benedict reminded. “There was that dog that broke out of the storeroom in the pet store and jumped on you. How do you account for such an anomaly, Dr. Lyle, considering all the other animals in the store were found dead?”

  “I can’t. Not yet, anyway.”

  “I’m more interested in your organism, Doctor,” General Starr said. “Have you been able to identify it yet?”

  “Only in terms of its baffling behavioral traits. No trace of it has been found in any of the bodies, meaning the organism likely dies when it is denied sustenance, in this case blood. A remarkably short and deadly life span, as borne out by the fact that the mall was actually clean, or safe, when I first entered.”

  “But you’ve maintained a limited quarantine anyway,” from Clare Benedict.

  “Standard procedure when dealing with any Biosafety Level Four hot agent. We don’t know all the rules it plays by, and until we do we like to err on the side of caution.”

  “Then you can’t rule out entry by hostile action,” persisted General Starr.

  “But I can’t rule it in, either. At this point it’s just one of the possibilities we’re considering. Equally likely is the fact that we’re facing a microbreak of unparalleled dimensions.”

  “Hostile action, microbreak, or whatever,” Starr continued, “just how was this agent, organism, or whatever you want to call it introduced into the mall? And what stopped it from getting out?”

  “Precisely what I’ve got to find out next, sir.”

  THREE

  “You’re late,” said Harry Lime, his face caught in the dull glow of the video game’s screen. “I was running out of quarters.” McCracken checked his watch. Lime had asked to meet him at Captain Hornblower’s on Front Street in Key West’s Old Town section at nine P.M. Located a few blocks off Duval Street at the foot of Mallory Square, the bar was a bit shabby, not as trendy as its neighbors and therefore not as crowded. At this early hour, the outside tables were filled, but inside there was plenty of seating in the booths as well as stools set before the bar. A badly painted sign near the entrance advertised live jazz for the weekend just ended. The building’s facade was painted white but much of it had peeled away to reveal the previous gray color.

  Blaine had entered unobtrusively through the open front and found Harry focused on the bar’s lone video game. Harry tilted the joystick hard to the right and Blaine saw his digital watch read nine-thirty, running thirty minutes fast, a holdover from his old flying days to make sure he was never late.r />
  Air America had been set up back in the sixties to win the good graces of Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese warlords so they might aid in the war effort. Air America pilots flew drugs, guns, just about anything anywhere out of Ton Sun Nyut Airbase to keep the warlords happy. These pilots also doubled as ferrymen for the Phoenix teams’ impossible missions. If men like McCracken were crazy enough to try, the saying went, then Air America was crazy enough to fly.

  But none were as crazy as Harry Lime. Another pilot who’d been stateside long enough to know Star Trek christened him the man who went where no man had gone before. By Southeast Asian standards it was true, never more so than when he was working with the team led by Blaine McCracken and Johnny Wareagle, the giant mystical Indian who to this day remained only a phone call away for Blaine and sometimes even closer.

  The game flashed GAME OVER and Lime whacked it in frustration.

  “I got the record on this thing. Wanna see my initials?”

  “Later maybe.”

  “You get to type them in when you set it. There, I think if we wait a few more seconds you’ll see them. I got three of the top five scores ever.” Harry seemed to finally register Blaine’s answer. “Later, then.”

  He collected the rest of his neatly stacked quarters and led Blaine away to a table in the rear. As near as McCracken could tell, Harry was wearing the same Hawaiian shirt he’d had on that afternoon. Only the lei was missing.

  “Careful when you sit down,” he cautioned when they reached the table squeezed between the bar and a counter that opened into the kitchen. Blaine saw on the table an incredibly intricate one-story house Harry had fashioned by stacking cigarettes in symmetrical layers. He’d just started work on a surrounding fence when the video game had captured his attention. Five empty beer bottles littered the table as well.

  “How long have you been here, Harry?”

  “I don’t know. Came straight here after we landed at Turnbull. Didn’t want to be late.”