In The Falling Light

by John L. Campbell

  Miranda leaned forward again, her breath hot and smelling like cheese crackers. “I took a knife from Mommy’s kitchen.”

  Emily stopped writing, stopped listening to Miss Crane.

  “The next time my baby brother Leo starts crying, I’m gonna push it into his tummy. I think he’s full of spaghetti-o’s.”

  Emily bolted to her feet, knocking her textbook to the floor, spinning to face the girl and clamping her hands to her ears. “Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up!”

  “Miss Green!” the teacher yelled, slapping her lesson plan onto her desk and striding up the row. “You know we don’t tolerate outbursts in class.”

  Emily was crying and started stomping her feet. “It’s her, Miss Crane! She won’t leave me alone!” She pointed at Miranda, who was staring down at her textbook as if she was innocent, one finger sneaking towards a nostril. “I hate you!” Emily screamed, wanting to slap her and pull her hair until she cried. Miss Crane snatched her by the upper arm and marched her through the class, and as she was pulled along Emily saw the shocked looks, the smiles, the whispering, the faces. A moment later she was alone in the hall with her teacher, who pressed her against a wall with both hands on her shoulders.

  Miss Crane seemed out of breath and rattled, looking as upset as Emily felt. “Now you’re going to stand here until I come get you, and you’re going to calm yourself down.” She straightened and took a deep breath, smoothing her hair back, her hands trembling just the slightest, then gave Emily a stern look before pushing back into the classroom.

  Alone in the hall, Emily’s crying soon stopped as she stared at the bulletin board on the far wall, bordered by green and blue twists of crepe paper with a blue background. A large school of multi-color construction paper fish covered it, and Emily saw the fish she had made, a neat, precise rendering of Nemo, complete with one fin smaller than the other. Then her eyes fell on Miranda’s, a giant, choppy red piranha with one bulging eye and a vast, open mouth filled with sharp teeth. For the first time she noticed the positions of the fish, and her eyes widened.

  Miranda’s fish was moving in for the kill.

  It was aiming for Nemo.

  Class dismissed at 2:30, and by 2:33 Emily was into the straps of her Bieber backpack and headed briskly towards an exit, trying to stay ahead of the crush of children pouring into the hall. She needed some lead time.

  A hand caught hold of her pack, and Emily was jerked into a recessed doorway.

  Miranda, nearly a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, held her against the door with one hand pressed against her chest. Her eyes were narrowed, and she kept licking her lips.

  “You gonna tell on me?” she asked. “You gonna tell what I said about my baby brother?”

  Emily tried to speak, tried to say, no, she wouldn’t tell, wanted to scream for a teacher to make the monster go away. All she could do was shake her head violently.

  Miranda seemed to think it over for a moment, then leaned in. “I think you’re gonna tell.” She bit her bottom lip and chewed. “Can’t let you tell. Gonna have to make you be a quiet girl.”

  Emily screamed and kicked out, landing a blow on the bigger girl’s shin, and Miranda howled, taking her hand off Emily. She took the opening and darted past, into the hall, heading for the exit doors and the promise of sunlight in the windows, the safety of outside. A moment later she was through and leaping down the steps, sprinting across the lawn, her backpack bouncing against her shoulders.

  “Emily!” A bellow behind her, and then the thud of heavy feet pounding down the steps. Emily ran faster.

  Taking the straight, direct route home was fastest but the bigger girl’s longer legs would catch her out in the open. Instead, she cut across Marshall Avenue and ran past a block of nicely kept homes, her pink Nikes slapping the sidewalk, then turned at the corner onto Douglas. She zipped between a pair of parked cars, crossed to the other side and ran past more houses before cutting diagonally across a yard and sprinting up the side of a brick ranch. There were no fences, only a hedge across the very back and in seconds she had dropped to her knees and was scrambling under it. Her backpack snagged, and for a terrifying moment she was hung up, trapped, losing valuable seconds. Then she heaved, and with a tearing of nylon, was free.

  Beyond was another yard with a turtle sandbox and a swing set, but thankfully no dog – she worried a little about dogs – and no one to yell at her for trespassing. Another run, this time under a rose trellis, and she was out on Palmer Street. Her street, only two blocks from home.

  She was puffing hard, her heart at full gallop, and there were leaves in her hair. The hedge had cut a red stripe across one cheek, and though she felt the sting, she didn’t care. Miranda would do far worse if she caught her.

  And the pounding feet were close.

  Emily didn’t see the puddle until she was in it, a small brown pond at the corner where a clogged storm drain had backed up. Her right foot splashed into it, nearly to the knee, and she was slow to react. A slimy leaf shot out from under her sneaker and she went down, face first, arms pin-wheeling.

  The splash was spectacular.

  Sputtering, she fought to her knees, blinking brown water out of her eyes, and then Miranda smashed into her from behind, forcing her back down. She felt the girl’s weight on her back, her hands in her hair, pushing her head under. She tried to scream, but only let out a burst of air and reflexively gasped, sucking in rain water that burned and made the world turn a quickly darkening red.

  Someone leaned on a car horn, a long, blaring close by that scared Miranda off her victim. Emily felt the weight leave her back and she flailed for the surface, choking and pulling in ragged breathes as Miranda ran away. The smaller girl barely glanced at the old woman in the nearby car, the one who had saved her and who now just stared at her with a look of shocked horror. Emily staggered on the asphalt, dripping and daring a glance back, but Miranda had ducked away between houses. She limped the last block home as quickly as she could.

  A few minutes later she banged through her front door and squeaked towards the kitchen, her shoulders hitching with a mixture of half sobs and relief. She didn’t care that she left wet, brown footprints on the floor and the hallway runner, didn’t care that she left a brown handprint on a wall. She had just escaped murder at the hands of a fifth grader. She was traumatized, her worst school day ever, and her mother would just have to understand.

  “Mom?” she said as she entered the kitchen.

  Emily Green, a single mom and a very worn-out thirty six, turned at the voice. She had a used-up look, her face long and lined, her eyes weary. Leo was riding her hip, his face covered in pasta sauce.

  “For Christ’s sake, Miranda, what have you been into?” She looked at her daughter, a heavy, hulking thing with a laundry list of imperfections, standing before her with arms limp at her sides and her mouth hanging open, wearing her usual dull expression. And now wet and muddy as well. “Did you track that through the house?”

  Miranda said nothing.

  Emily Green sighed as she took in the soggy, sack-like gray sweatshirt, the patched corduroys, the plain, yellow dollar store backpack with a big rip in it. All she could afford. She shook her head and looked away, putting Leo back in his high chair. “Go get cleaned up.”

  Emily stood in the doorway shocked, her designer clothes ruined and dripping. Get cleaned up? That was it? She had barely made it home alive, and this was her welcome? She turned and ran for her room, slamming the door behind her.

  “Don’t slam the door, Miranda,” called her mother.

  Emily shed her now-ruined Justin Bieber pack and walked into her closet, closing the door behind her and moving to the back, pressing against the wall, kicking a doll with a melted face out of the way. Sitting in complete darkness, she started chewing her thumbnail. Life was so unfair.

  A match flared, white and intense at first, then warm and flickering. “Leo’s gonna start crying soon,” Miranda said. “Wanna see my steak knife?”

/>   Emily began to scream.

  LYME DISEASE

  It got out.

  This single thought kept repeating itself as Joanna Bishop stood in a room of frightened people, everyone seeming to be moving and yet no one able to take their eyes off the big, wall-mounted screens. And the fact that it had gotten out – as catastrophic as that was - wasn’t the worst part. What it was doing was the real horror.

  On screen, live images shot from news choppers over Southern Connecticut, and a few attempts at ground coverage that didn’t last very long, brought home a central message. Groton Research Facility E-11 had become a monster factory.

  A screen on the left showed a bumpy image shot from a fast-moving car, the driver trying to negotiate a street in New London lined with businesses. The reporter’s narration came from off screen, and in the excitement of the moment whatever professional broadcasting skills he had learned no longer applied.

  “…left turn, left, left! Brian, as you can see the destruction is widespread, and it looks like most people have evacuated. We’re not seeing anyone on the streets, though there were some small groups fleeing the area a few minutes ago. At this point we don’t even see police or other emergency services. There are fires…”

  The jumpy video showed an overturned bread truck burning in an intersection, a dozen motionless bodies scattered around it on the pavement. The vehicle swerved to avoid running over one of them, and bounced over a curb.

  “…Ow! Shit! Okay Steve, head up this way. I thought I saw lights from a squad car. Brian, it looks like they’ve already moved through this area, so we’re heading east, into a more residential area. We’re going to try to find someone in command, though around here it seems -“

  A massive black shape with too many legs leaped from behind an abandoned bus, slamming head on into the news vehicle, starring the glass. There was a crunching of metal and the view tipped upside down as the car flipped over. The camera was still pointing forward, showing blood on the windshield, the driver slumped over with his head and neck flopped at an obscene angle. The view jerked as the camera was struck, rolling to show a cockeyed shot of a shattered window, then a man started screaming off screen, a bloody hand appeared, clawing for a grip as it was dragged away, and a moment later the video was lost to a blue screen.

  Connecticut 12 cut back to its studio. Brian, the anchor, looked pale and mumbled something about technical difficulties.

  Joanna looked at another screen, this one with the words RECORDED EARLIER scrolling across the bottom. A news chopper was sweeping low over I-95 outside Groton, above six lanes of divided highway packed with refugee traffic. A tide of black shapes spilled over the southernmost guardrail and poured across the slow-moving lanes. None of the cars were moving fast enough for dramatic wrecks, but collisions quickly piled up, and it all came to a halt. Helpless.

  The larvae were the size of footballs.

  The nymphs were as big as picnic tables.

  Adults were the same size as the cars they ran at, struck and flipped over. All were hard-shelled and black, eight-legged with barbed claws. Some of the smaller ones were crushed by low speed crashes, but after being hit the larger ones simply flipped from their backs to their legs and attacked the cars, claws reaching through open windows, pincers ripping open car doors to get at the occupants. Hunting for blood meals.

  “Lt. Jeffries,” Joanna called, not looking away from the screen, “temperature reading?”

  A man behind her responded at once. “The complex is reading a constant forty-one degrees, Colonel.”

  “Complex status?” This question was directed to the man standing beside her, a major with dark good looks and an impeccable uniform.

  “We’re on complete lockdown, Colonel.”

  “The lab?”

  “On lockdown as well.”

  “Keep an eye on the temperature, Spencer. I don’t want it above forty-two.” It was an order she had repeated several times already, but the major affirmed it as if it was the first time, and Joanna looked around at the people in the bunker’s command center. Most wore sweaters or jackets, and most wore gloves, except for those working keyboards, who had to stop and shake their hands every so often to keep the blood moving. Breath puffed in the air like little white ghosts, but no one complained about the cold. They had all been briefed on what happened at anything warmer than forty-five degrees.

  Major Peck moved off to check on an officer, and Joanna took a seat at an unused workstation, her iPad in her lap. She ran her fingertips over the leather cover, tracing the letters stamped into it, smiling; Bishop, Joanna C. Lt. Col. U.S. Army. Olivia had given it to her last year, a gift to celebrate her promotion to light colonel. Olivia, her tough-minded sister who had survived both a divorce and breast cancer. She would have made an outstanding officer. Joanna wondered if Delaware was far enough away to keep her sister safe. And for how long?

  She opened the iPad and brought up the facility app, tapping in a top-clearance passcode, then tapping her way through several menus until she brought up real-time schematics. The first was a satellite shot of the exterior. E-11 was a mostly underground complex at the edge of the Groton Boat Yards, having once been part of the naval facility but now taken over by the U.S. Army exclusively for Project Blackleg.

  When one thought of secret, underground military research facilities, places like the Utah and Nevada deserts came to mind. Not coastal, heavily-populated Connecticut. It was both coincidental and ironic that this research should have been carried out so close to the town of Lyme, the original discovery point for the disease back in 1975. It should have been Nevada, she thought, as far away from people as possible. Someplace you could quickly nuke if something went wrong.

  Her finger moved the screen around. A project like this should have never been.

  She traced the perimeter fence and double tapped at each guard post, confirming that all the MPs had been pulled back into the safety of the bunker. She next scrolled through the floor-plans of the above ground structures, looking for the heat signatures which would indicate people who had missed the evacuation to the sub-levels. There was no sign of life. No human life, anyway. Her fingertips slipped and tapped through all three subterranean levels, no longer looking for heat sources (there were plenty of those) but checking to see that the Firebreaks were secure. These were triple-thick steel blast doors which, during lockdown, compartmentalized the complex much like watertight doors on a ship. As Major Peck had indicated, E-11 was secure.

  She snorted.

  Not secure enough, clearly. Not tight enough to keep L-2207 from escaping. And the little bastard was not only blood and fluid-borne as intended, but had also figured out a way to become airborne. That had never been intended. Nor had its side effects.

  “Colonel?”

  Joanna looked over her shoulder at Master Sergeant Jackson standing in a doorway, one of her communication people.

  “Ma’am, ten minute warning for your call.”

  “Inform Major Peck, please.”

  “He’s already in the conference room, Colonel.”

  Joanna nodded. “Carry on.” She switched apps and pulled up data she would need for her call with the Pentagon. They had access to the same information, but she would be expected to give the brief. Data and an assortment of close-up color photographs appeared on screen. The images were disturbing.

  Project Blackleg’s objective had been the testing of accelerated biological processes, with the primary subject being Ixodes Scapularis, the North American Blacklegged Tick, selected for its durability and capacity to carry and transmit ten known diseases. The introduction of radical growth hormones showed early progress, and the scientific minds at the Pentagon quickly saw the potential for weaponization turn to reality with the development of Batch L-2207. Simply put, the goal had been to breed large specimens which could be infected with any number of nasty diseases, then release them in enemy territory or population and let them spread death. No exposure of American troops, n
o cruise missiles or carriers, and very, very cost effective. Technically, the project was a violation of international law and a breach of half a dozen treaties the U.S. had signed or even sponsored. And it was also just like many other nasty, top secret weapons programs her country developed. Although there was no immediate need and certainly no plans to use it, the generals and the White House liked to have options. Just in case.

  So they had done as asked, and succeeded. And for whatever it was worth, not a single specimen had escaped the complex. In fact they had all been terminated in their breeding chambers the moment everything went wrong. None had gotten out.

  It was L-2207 that snuck past her multi-layer security program.

  Joanna closed her iPad and made her way to the conference room, finding Major Peck on a phone. He glanced at her, said “yes, sir,” and hung up.

  “What was that?”

  “Just verifying the link.” He pointed to the big screen on one wall. “It’s a video conference.”

  Joanna didn’t like the way he had trouble meeting her eyes.

  “Is Dr. DeVries joining the call?”

  “Not this time.” Joanna took her seat at the head of the conference table. She and Peck were the only ones in the room.

  “Don’t you think he should be?”

  “If they wanted him on the call, they would have asked for him. Besides, I have all his data.”

  “Still, Joanna…”

  She looked at him. “That’s enough, Major.”

  Spencer Peck held his commander’s gaze a moment longer than was polite, then shuffled through his own files. He was a West Point graduate the same as her, they had both been to the War College, but of the two of them, he was the only one with combat experience. A tour in Afghanistan followed by another in Iraq should have put those silver oak clusters on his shoulder boards, not hers.