The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  She clenches her fists, holding them stiffly to her sides, and stares at the ground, sick with shame and disgust.

  The guards lead the procession by her and begin to bind each prisoner to a post.

  Even in the darkness Wey Chen sees their bare feet as they pass. From the small size of some, she counts at least six women in the group. Their sobs mingle with those of the men, but are quieter, and involve less retching.

  Soon they are all attached to the poles, and the boots of the officer in charge appear in front of her. She raises her gaze, trying to focus only on this soldier’s young bland face. It shows no more emotion than one of the toy dolls that Jade plays with. But the shadowy forms behind him, barely visible through the gloom, loom so large in her mind they dominate the courtyard.

  “The subjects are ready, Doctor,” the soldier says.

  She takes a breath, pulls her stethoscope out from the pocket of her OR outfit, and walks woodenly over to the front row of victims.

  The first is a small, elderly woman who shakes with terror, her head no higher than Wey Chen’s shoulders. She wears a simple smock, as do all the prisoners. It’s filthy, and reeks of urine. Though bound hand and foot, she strains at her ties, managing to shrink from Wey Chen’s touch by twisting around the post. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Hold still!” the young guard says. He stands at Wey Chen’s side, clutching a slim stack of manila folders, his pen at the ready.

  Wey Chen puts on the stethoscope. The ear-pieces muffle the chorus of whimpers and moans that swirl around her. Baring a patch of the woman’s chest, she applies the listening bell. It amplifies her cries to a shriek. “I can’t make out what I need to hear.”

  “Quiet, old woman,” the guard says, speaking much more softly than before. “The doctor’s just going to check your lungs.”

  The unexpected gentleness of his tone silences the old lady, and she looks at him incredulously. “Before you shoot me, you want to give me a medical?” she says.

  Wey Chen easily picks up the sounds of clear air entry all the way to the base of each lung. “Normal,” she says.

  The guard makes a note, and walks on to the next subject.

  Wey Chen follows, but can feel the old woman’s eyes on the back of her neck and hears her begin to weep.

  The next person, a man about thirty, keeps his eyes closed and makes a high-pitched sing-song noise while thrashing his head back and forth, as if movement and sound can buffer him from what is about to happen. She places the stethoscope against his chest, and waits until he draws a breath. “Clear,” she says, and moves on, stepping ahead of the guard this time. The quicker she gets through this, the less likely she’ll be to throw up.

  The next person is a man who could have been her father. He stands silently erect, staring off into the night. From his military bearing, she thinks that he must be a soldier.

  “Clear.”

  What crimes they’d committed or whether they deserved the fate about to befall them--she refuses to think about such things.

  Men or women, young or old, she simply listens to what would be close to their last breaths, pronounces their lungs clear, and moves on, practically running from one to the next. For some, even if she can’t hear their breathing properly, she says their lungs are normal anyway, just to get this nightmare over with.

  A middle-aged male, babbling gibberish in fright, loses control of his bladder as she places her hand on him. He bursts into tears. “I didn’t want to do that. I swore that that wouldn’t happen. I didn’t want that to happen.” Then he looks straight at her, and his face seems to crumple inward, his eyes two black pools of agony. “I’m so sorry. Forgive me--”

  “It’s all right,” she says, and flees to the next.

  When, in 2002, she’d betrayed a foreign woman whom she did not know, it had seemed a small price to rescue a husband. Yet that’s when they’d learned her price to sell out strangers.

  Not that the sell-out had helped for long. Soon after, they took her husband away again. She no longer knew for sure if he was still alive. Now she does their bidding to keep them from extracting the ultimate penalty, the menace of it always there, suspended in the silence that follows the implied threats.

  “To be complete, we will eventually conduct trials with children,” her supervisor had said more than once in an indefinite, off-hand manner. He clearly meant Jade.

  She finishes with the last subject and retreats to the far corner of the courtyard where she slumps against the wall, then doubles over and vomits.

  She hears the sound of the truck pull up, the doors open, and the exchange of orders as the soldiers begin to erect the tent. In a matter of minutes they have it set up, enclosing the twenty prisoners.

  Other workers zip the bottom of the walls to a base already embedded in the ground, completing an airtight fit. One of the soldiers then snaps a set of large hoses with customized nozzles into their corresponding inlets, again creating a perfect seal. The prisoners begin to scream, thinking they are about to be gassed.

  But Wey Chen knows that their deaths will take longer, and they’ll be painfully worse for it.

  “Don’t worry about your American friends ever finding out that we did this,” her supervisor mocks with a sarcastic smirk. “They’ve eased off their surveillance since our two nations now enjoy such improved relations. If their spy satellites do pick up anything, we say that Chinese justice now uses cyanide on criminals who are condemned to death, modeling ourselves after that former mainstay of good old Yankee justice, the gas chamber.”

  Someone starts a generator on the truck, the noise of the motor obliterating the shrieks from inside.

  She turns around to face the proceedings, yet sags, still dizzy from being sick, and once more leans her back against the wall. But she must make sure this is done right, not end up like Huong Lee when he botched the job. That would mean Jade’s death sentence. They might even tie them side by side to one of those posts. Force mother and daughter to endure each other’s cries, the better to set an example for a new successor.

  Ignoring the lurching spin in her head, she pushes off from the wall and walks over to where she can inspect the hoses. Everything seems to be in order.

  Within minutes, the sides of the tent suck inward, evidence that the required negative pressure to keep organisms within the structure has been achieved. A group of soldiers wheel up a dozen large tanks similar to the ones that contain oxygen in her hospital. They connect them to the tent through another set of hoses, snapping them into smaller sealed inlets, these spaced twenty feet apart, each placed to deliver its spray to a designated area inside.

  When all is ready, Wey Chen nods. The young officer with the bland face steps up and, one by one, opens the valves.

  Wey Chen closes her eyes, just as she did back then, but this flashback forces her to imagine what those tanks unleashed.

  Millions of viral spheres bristling with tiny spikes pour into the lungs of her victims, lock onto the cells that line their respiratory trees, and flood the cytoplasm with alien RNA. These invaders infiltrate the intricate molecular machinery by which human tissue sustains itself and force the new hosts to make new viruses. Days telescope into minutes, and glistening air sacks rupture as the commandeered cells, teeming with pestilence, burst open to spill out a new generation of occupiers. They immediately contaminate adjacent tissues, and the destruction spreads.

  She blinks over and over, attempting to wash the images from sight, but can’t escape them. After an eternity, the visions switch to where she actually fled that day, the one place that provides a few hours reprieve from this charnel house. As long as she paid for her own bullets, the commanders had always allowed her unlimited use of a firing range in a nearby field. She hated guns, but banging off round after round numbed her mind.

  She stands with legs locked in a wide stance, pistol gripped in her right hand, wrist steadied by her left, and feels the recoil shoot through her body like an orga
sm as shot upon shot shreds an army of paper silhouettes. To survive her new duties, her thoughts tell her, she’ll be buying up every bullet in the place.

  The flashback wrenches her ahead two more days.

  By now every one of her subjects--the old woman, the young man, the ex-soldier, the terrified incontinent father, the whole twenty--are either dead, or fighting to suck air through lungs that have become little more than lobes of bloody pulp.

  Wey Chen dons a yellow biohazard suit equipped with portable tanks of compressed air. The sound of her own breathing in the closed hood fills her ears. The dread of facing her victims encases her more than the constricting outfit.

  She cautiously enters the sealed antechamber of the tent, then zips open a flap allowing access to the interior hell. Mist still hangs in the air as she goes from body to body. Those who are alive beg her to kill them. Even amplified over the audio system of her suit, their voices sound little more than the rasp of a nail file. For some, words are nearly lost in the gurgle of their death-rattles.

  Those who are already dead she cuts free and lays out on the ground.

  A few orderlies wearing the same gear as herself float through the deadly fog like attending spirits, offering cups of water to parched lips that could now barely sip, their job having been to ward off dehydration, not for humanitarian reasons, but to ensure the subjects live as long as possible so that their bodies reach an advanced end stage of the infection.

  Wey Chen orders these minions out, too ashamed to perform the next step in front of witnesses. “Follow showering and decontamination procedures to the letter,” she says, masking her own turmoil with a fierce strictness. “Or face being shot!”

  Once they’d left, Wey Chen zips the inner flap closed and gets to work.

  The so-called scientists who’d designed this protocol insisted doctors do the autopsies on site to lower the risk of a containment leak. The bodies could be sealed in bags afterward, the exterior of which would be decontaminated in the anteroom, and they’d be carried to the facility’s HAZMAT incinerator for safe disposal. The tent, made of multilayered plastics, would then be thoroughly sterilized for its next use.

  Using a portable bone saw, she cuts open the chests of each corpse, ladles out the semi-liquid remains, and, slices off samples from whatever solid bits she finds. These she seals in labeled jars for subsequent microscopic examination and cultures.

  All under the gaze of those few victims who are still alive.

  They’re too far gone to see me, she reassures herself.

  Until she happens to glance up while reaching for a specimen vial.

  The slack, blue-tinged face of the old woman whom she’d first examined at the start of the ordeal stares down at her. The expressionless, wrinkled flesh, already shadowed with death, hangs flaccid from her bones. But she hasn’t died just yet. Like coals in the darkness, her eyes burn with such contempt they sear Wey Chen to the heart.

  Wells Beach, Maine

  Stretching as she got out of her chair, Anna tiptoed toward the bedroom. There Kyra slept tangled in her covers, still exhausted from their night’s maneuvers to avoid the police. Her only other visible sign of being worse for wear--black hair hacked short with manicure scissors in a train-station washroom, the intent being to make her look like a boy--caused Anna to smile.

  “A simple disguise, but it worked in Shakespeare’s time,” her worldly Kyra had argued, gleefully caught up in the adventure of being on the run. She’d also boldly predicted that the FBI would soon kiss their butts, begging for forgiveness, once Mom and Dad had set them straight.

  Oh, to be drunk on the bravado that only a teenager can muster, Anna mused. But to also be so fragile, so easily discouraged . . .

  Minutes later in that same washroom, Kyra’s face had burned red as she fought back tears, fearing what her friends must think, her mother and father being branded terrorists. She even let “Mummy” console her, a rare event in her brief career as an adolescent.

  Anna had pointed to their reflections in the grungy mirror that hung over a row of stained sinks. “So what do you think of my disguise?” she asked.

  Kyra’s expression had soured as if she’d bitten into a lemon. “You mean the short spikes of mahogany hair, freshly colored and sticking out Lisa-Simpson style?”

  “Yeah. Kinda’ young and perky, no?”

  “Definitely not. You look like a middle-aged squeegee kid.”

  Mid-afternoon, Anna’s cell phone rang.

  Just once.

  When she checked, call identification had been blocked.

  Forty seconds later, it rang twice.

  The back of her neck tingled.

  The next ring would be be thirty seconds later. That had been their code in Sverdlovsk to signal each other who was calling.

  It came.

  “Yuri?” she answered.

  “Anechka!”

  “Where are you?”

  “This is a land line. It can be traced,” he said in Russian. “I’ve only seconds. The Chinese killed Boris. Now they’re after us both. You and Kyra stay hidden. I’ll sort it out, fix everything, and call you when it’s safe--”

  “Yuri, wait a damn minute and tell me what you did--”

  “I love you.”

  The connection went dead.

  It was dusk when the FBI came.

  A string of red and blue flashing lights appeared through the late afternoon gloom from across the causeway. They resembled neon fireflies floating on the mist, the vehicles themselves invisible in the fog, their approach silent.

  Anna watched them draw nearer. She stood at the window, Kyra by her side, their arms around each other.

  She was surprised it had taken them this long.

  When they got to cottage row and turned toward their end of the spit, she and Kyra stepped back into the darkness of the room. Three state trooper cars and a black Chevrolet sedan so plain that it virtually screamed, “Cops inside,” cruised by, then stopped a half mile farther down the road, in front of Anna’s house.

  The nice thing about Maine is that neighbors want you to know where their spare keys are so you can check their houses while they’re away in the off-season. The particular neighbor whose house Anna and Kyra had chosen to hide in didn’t use it much during winter.

  “We’ve given ourselves some time,” she whispered to Kyra. But the police wouldn’t be fooled for long.

  “Mom, if the Feds are thirty houses away, why are you whispering?” the girl said, slashing the gloom with a wicked grin every bit as insolent as Yuri’s.

  Chapter 22

  That evening, Friday, January 23, 2009, 6:30 P.M. MST

  Passenger seat of F-16 trainer 90-0718 at forty thousand feet somewhere over Arizona, en route to San Antonio International Airport, Texas

  “Congratulations, Ryder. You lied like a politician,” Betty Houston told him. Her usual Texas drawl had now morphed into a less strident, southern-belle accent, the manner of speech she preferred when in residence at her Atlanta office. However, even on the three-inch screen of a video phone, the gray eyes and square face, framed in a spray of silver hair, projected an image of steely determination rather than silken manners.

  “It sucks, Betty. People are going to know.”

  “Not necessarily. Your avoidance of the limelight in the past makes you a fresh voice. People will listen, as opposed to blowing off the same ol’ same ol’ from an all too familiar warhorse like me. So you’ll also be a calming voice.”

  “How about truthful?”

  “Hey! None of your three blue pins stuff, or we’ll have panic by the truckload. You toe the party line like the rest of us, my friend. ‘We’re up against something natural,’ etcetera, until proven otherwise.”

  “But--”

  “Be good, Terry! From Washington’s point of view, the bioweapons angle is, as we say in Texas, a dog that won’t hunt.” Her casual drawl took on the sharp edge that the lady was famous for when addressing an idiot.

&n
bsp; “And if reporters ask about rumors to the contrary?” Terry asked. He detested being muzzled.

  “Terry, listen very carefully. Washington signs all our checks, and that’s how they want to call the shots. Anyone who doesn’t play along, a whole lot of doors, such as funded access to a level four lab, will be slammed in his or her face. We can’t afford to have you sidelined, so lose the attitude. Get it?”

  All the fight drained out of Terry, and he felt quivery inside, as if hit with night sweats after a fever broke. Little wonder, he told himself, putting it down to being sleep deprived. “Sure, I ‘get it.’ You want me to behave.” Mustering a grin, he added, “But only if you whisper in my ear that down deep, you don’t buy the no-evidence-of-an-attack crap.”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “And promise you’ll still respect me in the morning?”

  “Deal! Now good luck in San Antonio. You’ll love the Tex-Mex.”

  Glancing through the aircraft’s canopy, Terry surveyed the scene below. A late afternoon sun painted the desert and mountains in long strokes of harsh light and deep shadow. The twisted gullies that scarred their vast surface fed into each other, reminding him of a dark vascular tree on the surface of a brain.

  He clicked to the Internet and checked his intelligence communiqués.

  FBI reports of Yuri escaping to Canada through the Thousand Islands under a hail of bullets headlined the lot.

  “Son of a bitch!” he muttered, and did a mind flip to 2003.

  Shortly after the SARS outbreak, an appearance of three little blue pins on his wall map, and a surprise phone call from Anna Katasova asking bizarre questions about Wey Chen’s dissident husband, he’d received an equally surprising visit at his home in Waianae by General Robert Daikens.