Cranston took the camcorder from the forensics tech and turned it over and over in his hands.
Lauren heard it softly whir as it continued to record.
The Special Agent opened the three-inch side-flap view screen, then looked back at the tech.
"See if you can find any more of these." He pressed the STOP button and the red light over the lens darkened. He turned to face the rest of them. "Are you guys ready to do this?"
III
Cranston led them out of the big top and into the wash of light where at least the breeze circulated the stench. Lauren breathed a sigh of relief. She had begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable under the blank stares of the dead that packed the bleachers. Consciously, she knew they weren't actually watching her, but that didn't alleviate the crawling sensation on her skin. She didn't suppose the fact that they had all been killed by some sort of wasp helped in that regard either.
The other agents closed rank around Cranston, forcing Lauren to stand on her toes to see between them.
Cranston rewound the recording to the start and pressed PLAY.
The shaky footage began with a close-up of a woman holding a toddler on her hip. The young boy bared a big grin for the camera. Behind them, Lauren saw the ticket booth down the hill through the grove of trees. They were standing at the edge of the parking lot while scores of people who had no idea what fate had in store for them funneled past.
The sound was a continuous low rumble metered by the excited cries of children and the occasional feline roar.
Cut to a jostling view of the inside of the fairgrounds. The woman now held the child's hand as they weaved through the crowd, passing games of chance stocked with stuffed animals bigger than the young boy, various attractions with greasy ticket collectors, and carts selling pretzels, snow cones, and glowing necklaces. The woman held up the child's hand and helped him wave to the camera.
Another cut and they were in a different section of the grounds. This time, Lauren could only assume, the woman held the camcorder while presumably the father piggybacked the boy, who clung to the man's forehead as though his life depended upon it. The man pointed off to his right and the lens followed. A pen had been cordoned off in a broad section of dirt. The sign on the fence promised camel rides for five dollars. A grungy man with a scraggly beard guided the camel in a circle by its reigns, much to the delight of the twin girls perched between its fur-capped humps.
The camera swung again to the right and zoomed in on another enclosure where several men raked hay into piles for the elephant troupe. One of the pachyderms thrust its trunk into the mound, gave it a twirl, and lifted a clump to its mouth. Another man appeared with a hose and sprayed down the smaller elephants in the rear. Flies buzzed around them, causing the enormous animals to flap their ears. Heaps of dung led all the way back to where a fourth elephant rested listlessly on its side. Two more men, who had obviously fallen in the mud several times, pushed and shoved at the behemoth in an effort to force it back to its feet. It didn't even appear capable of standing.
Lauren had a pretty good hunch as to why.
A small crowd had gathered off to the side to watch, among them a couple of teenagers smoking and passing back and forth a water bottle that made them wince with each swig of the spiked concoction, an elderly man with an ornate cane that appeared too short to be of any real use, and a visibly pregnant woman with coffee-colored skin who wore her raven-black hair in a ponytail and an expression of abject horror on her face.
Past the elephant's rear haunches, a man of Middle Eastern descent stood stock-still, staring down at the animal, his features devoid of emotion. He wore a faded ball cap low over his hooded eyes and what looked like a cattle prod in a sheath on one hip and a transceiver holstered on the other.
One of the men who had been trying to make the sick elephant stand rushed up to him, gesticulating wildly with his hands. The man with the ball cap glanced over at the spectators, his gaze lingering on one of them for a long moment, and then ushered the agitated handler toward an unmarked mobile trailer.
The recording darkened. A sudden flash forced the aperture to rectify its focus. The center ring was spread out below, partially obscured by the heads of the people in the row below the cameraman. The ringmaster stepped into the spotlight, but the camera panned left and focused on the young boy's face. He sat in his mother's lap, eyes bright, mouth open wide in wonder.
Cut to clowns piling out of a miniature car. Acrobats flipping and twirling from the high-wires. A lion tamer goading his maned charge with a whip and a chair. A tiger leaping through a ring of fire. A parade of elephants circling the ring.
There was a high-pitched squeal that degenerated into feedback.
The view snapped suddenly to the left. In the foreground, the young boy pressed his small hands to the sides of his head. Above his head, the camera focused on a bank of speakers mounted to the tent supports, then whipped back toward the ring, flashing past faces that had all turned toward the sound, hands clapped over their ears.
One of the elephants wobbled and fell. Several trainers raced to its side.
The field of view panned across the chaos. Clowns and other performers walked slowly into the center of the ring from where they'd been watching from the shadows, uncertain of exactly what was transpiring, but prepared to do whatever it took to keep the show going.
A shadowed figure hurried past the clowns toward the lone exit. It passed under the spotlight just long enough for Lauren to recognize the man with the cattle prod from the elephant pen.
The camera jerked back to where the ringmaster called for the audience's attention. Clowns cavorted around him and trapeze artists hurriedly scaled the posts toward their perches.
Abruptly, the squealing sound ceased.
The ringmaster smiled and laughed as though it were all part of the show.
Two men ran over and grabbed him by the jacket. The same men who had been tending to the lame elephant.
Screams erupted from everywhere at once.
The camera jerked to the left in time to capture a shot of what looked like static boiling out of the elephant's gut. Black dots expanded into a cloud, and the people in the row in front of the camera jumped up from their seats, eclipsing the view. Bodies hurtled past. Footsteps thundered on the bleachers. The screams grew louder and louder until they reached an awful crescendo that overwhelmed the recorder's microphone.
There was a loud clattering sound as the camera fell to the man's feet.
A dark, slender shape with spindly legs and a twitchy abdomen crawled across the lens.
The screams went on for what felt like an eternity before dissolving into a crackling buzz.
The aperture focused in and out on the blurry insect and the hand dangling from the bleachers beyond it.
After several moments, another high-pitched squeal sounded. Muffled this time, as though coming from far away.
The wasp flew away from the lens.
A buzzing drone faded until only the squawk of feedback remained.
And then there was only silence.
IV
"Jesus," Cranston whispered.
Lauren echoed his sentiment. That was the most horrible thing she had ever seen. So many people in pain, so many dying in the worst possible manner.
Cranston looked at each of them in turn.
"I need to know what the hell those things were, how they got into that elephant, and why they attacked like that. I want to know where they went. I need to put a name to every single one of those bodies. And I need to know what in the name of God was in those stingers." He spun a slow circle. All eyes were on him. "What are you waiting for?"
The group spurred to life at once.
Lauren turned and headed back toward the tent. She was already making a mental checklist in her head. She needed tissue and blood samples from the elephant, a cross-section from several different corpses---
"Hey, doc!" Cranston called after her.
He jogg
ed to catch up with her, took her by the elbow, and spoke softly so that only she could hear.
"I don't have to tell you that time is a critical factor here. With what's lined up in Atlanta, we need this resolved as quickly and quietly as possible." He paused. "I really don't like the timing of this."
Lauren nodded.
Cranston searched her eyes for a long moment, nodded back, and then turned away to rejoin the others.
She hurried into the tent and began the slow, arduous task of cutting tissue from various points along the elephant's digestive tract, from its tongue all the way through to its rectum. By the time she finished, she'd found four more intact wasp carcasses, minus their stingers, which she could only assume were embedded somewhere in the mucosal lining. She aspirated milky fluid from the boils on several of the human corpses, took samples of blood and cerebrospinal fluid, and collected more stingers and the striated skin around them. The medical examiner would perform a thorough examination of the remains to provide a conclusive mechanism of death. Right now, Lauren just needed to make sure there were no virulent microorganisms or otherwise contagious agents in the stingers. From there, she could move on to toxins and allergens, and determine if an immediate injection of antihistamines or steroids would counteract the life-threatening effects.
Her thoughts drifted back to the video recording. The wasps had chewed their way out of the animal's bowels as she had suspected, but there were several things she had noticed that didn't quite make sense. First, there was the high-pitched tone that had come from the speakers. It hadn't been feedback. The sound had been too regular, unwavering. It not only appeared to have surprised the audience, but the performers as well. And it was shortly thereafter that the wasps had emerged from the elephant's abdomen. Was it possible that the two were somehow related? Then there was the second occurrence after everyone was already dead, softer, as though attenuated by distance. That had been when all of the insects had flown away, hadn't it? And what about the mystery man? He had to be someone with a measure of authority within the carnival. The elephant handler had approached him as though he were in charge. And then in the middle of the chaos, while all of the performers had been converging in the center ring, he'd been moving in the opposite direction in a big hurry.
A mental image formed of the man, staring down at the dying pachyderm, his face blank, a stark contrast to the mortified expression on the woman's.
Lauren gathered her sample-filled case and exited the tent. She had just veered toward the path that would lead her back to her car when she heard someone shout from the eastern side of the grounds, past a series of smaller tents and a row of decrepit rides. A group of agents was already running in that direction. She followed out of curiosity, passing bumper cars and a toddler-size Ferris wheel and various concessions booths until she reached the edge of the forest. Voices carried through a maze of sycamores and cypresses bearded with moss. Moonlight glinted between the trunks from a large body of water. When she finally emerged from the wilderness, she found the agents fanned out along a stretch of muddy bank bordering a lake. She could barely see the wall of trees on the other side. Several men crouched at the water's edge, while others passed around binoculars.
Small waves shushed toward the low-water mark. In the spring, there would be standing water throughout the woods.
"Well," Cranston said. He separated from the others and walked over to her side. "That's one problem solved."
She raised her eyebrows and waited for him to elaborate.
He simply pointed at the sloppy ground. She hadn't noticed it at first. The waves carried small black wasp carcasses onto the shore, where they formed a ridge several inches deep, like the ring of scum around a bathtub.
All of them dead, all missing their stingers.
"Grab as many as you like, doc," Cranston said. He clapped her on the shoulder and rejoined his team.
Lauren fished a collection bag from her case and stuffed it full of soggy wasps. What could possibly have caused the entire swarm to drown itself?
She loaded the bag into her briefcase and stared out across the lake in the same direction as the agents with their field glasses. There was something out there, low on the water. A dark shape with a shallow profile. She strolled over to the man who held the binoculars.
"May I?" she asked.
The man passed them to her without a word. Lining up the lenses with her eyes through the plastic shield was a difficult proposition, but she finally succeeded and zeroed in on the black silhouette. Magnified, she could tell exactly what it was.
A small rowboat gently rose and fell on the waves in a shimmering reflection of moonlight. Its cargo consisted of two large rectangular shapes.
Massive black boxes.
Amplifiers.
CHAPTER TWO
I
Atlanta, Georgia
Lauren returned to her lab on the third floor of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory, forty-two miles from the fairgrounds, in time to watch the sun rise. It was the perfect time to be there, the only time when she could clearly think. The CDC was adding more than twenty thousand square feet onto the building to accommodate the new class IV cleanrooms necessary to keep up with the slew of nasty diseases that seemed to crop up in increasing numbers every year. The construction crews with their infernal hammering and drilling and pounding, which positively made the floor vibrate, wouldn't be arriving for more than two hours, so they needed to take full advantage of the opportunity.
Physically, she was exhausted, but mentally she was firing on all cylinders. There was so much to be done that she could hardly slow down to think about it while moving from one task to the next. The entire lab was a frenzy of activity. Lab techs bounced from one station to the next. Centrifuges whirled and mass spectrometers hummed. Carcasses were dissected with microscopic guidance. Tissue samples were stained and run through a gamut of tests. It was a precisely orchestrated performance that undoubtedly looked chaotic to the untrained eye, but to Lauren, it was poetry in motion; an elaborate dance by men and women who had never rehearsed this particular version. There was no protocol in place for evaluating this specific vector. Wasps had never been known to transmit such a nasty pathogen, and their toxin wasn't especially aggressive. Even people who were deathly allergic to bee stings rarely reacted to those of a wasp. And yet here they were, improvising as they went, attacking these little black creatures on the atomic level.
So far, they had yet to find the presence of any viral or bacterial agents, which was the most important step. It was ultimately too soon to conclusively rule out the presence of any or all pathogenic processes, but Lauren figured it was only a matter of time now.
What they had found, however, was truly extraordinary.
With the help of Dr. Reginald Wilton, professor of Agricultural Technology and resident entomologist at Georgia Tech, they had thoroughly examined the anatomy of the wasps and made some startling revelations. This was no naturally occurring species they were dealing with here, but an amalgam of several. The general body type was consistent on a macroscopic level with that of the common paper wasp---minus the structure of the stinger array---while the coloration more closely resembled that of a parasitic digger wasp. That was where it passed from strange to remarkable.
A wasp's stinger was more than simply a mechanism for delivering venom. It was an ovipositor, a functional tube used to deposit eggs. Thus, only the females of any given species had stingers. Colonial wasps produced a single queen capable of laying eggs, while all of the other females were essentially born sterile. Apparently wasps had a staggering amount of control in determining the sex of their offspring. Every egg was naturally haploid, which meant it would always yield a female. After fertilization, however, it became diploid and always produced a male. And all of the carcasses they had found were viable females, as evidenced by their missing stingers and the fully-developed egg sacs in their abdomens. This suggested that the wasps weren't colonial at all, like their hive-buil
ding cousins, but parthenogenic, capable of reproducing entire generations of females asexually. In that regard, they were like the parasitic wasps of the Apocrita suborder, which were commonly released in fields of crops to control the infestation of pest insects. These species of wasps used their stingers to deliver a paralyzing dose of venom into other insects like caterpillars and spiders, and while the insect was incapacitated, laid their eggs directly into its body. The larvae then developed until they were effectively able to kill and consume their host.
The structure of this new hybrid's ovipositor assembly mimicked that of a honey bee. All stingers have microscopic hooks along the stylet called lancets that enable them to latch onto their prey long enough to deliver their venom before retracting. Bees have larger lancets. That's the reason they lose their ovipositors after stinging a human being; the skin is too thick and tough to allow the lancets to disengage, which causes the bee to simply tear off its entire reproductive system in an effort to fly away. From there, it's only a matter of time before the insect dies.
Its mandibles were much larger, sharper, and attached to more elaborate musculature than that of a standard wasp. They looked more like those of a termite, which were designed for chewing through hard wood, only proportionate to the wasp's body size. There was no doubt they were easily strong enough to masticate mammalian tissue.
There were other bizarre mutations as well. Normal venom contains a toxin called melittin, plus various concentrations of apamine, hyaluronidase, phospholipases and phosphatases, and degranulating proteins. This particular species had only a fraction of the melittin in its venom sac, which meant that its vasoactive properties were markedly subdued. One sting wouldn't cause the victim's throat to swell shut, or produce hives, dizziness or loss of consciousness while the wasp laid its eggs. It would literally take dozens of stings to cause death to the average person without an acute allergy.
The Calm Before The Swarm Page 2