Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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THE CALM BEFORE THE SWARM

A Novella

Michael McBride

The Calm Before the Swarm copyright © 2011 by Michael McBride

Previously published in the collection Quiet, Keeps to Himself copyright © 2011 by Michael McBride, from Thunderstorm Books

Cover photograph copyright © 2011 by Konkolas

All Rights Reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Michael McBride.

For more information about the author, please visit his website: www.michaelmcbride.net

THE CALM BEFORE THE SWARM

For Paul…the ultimate publisher/collector

Special Thanks to Paul Goblirsch, Jeff Strand, Gene O’Neill, Leigh Haig, Bill Rasmussen, Brian Keene, my family, and all of my loyal readers, without whom none of this would be possible.

THE CALM BEFORE THE SWARM

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

 

– John Dewey

 

 

Cursed is the man who dies, but the evil done by him survives.

 

– Abu Bakr

 

 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

 

– Arthur C. Clarke

CHAPTER ONE

I

Lithium Springs, Georgia

Dr. Lauren Allen pulled up to the barricade in a wash of red and blue lights and rolled down the window of her Sahara Silver Audi A5. A uniformed officer accepted her proffered badge jacket without a word and compared her identification against the list on his clipboard. His upper lip glistened with a liberal application of Vick’s VapoRub. She could smell it even over the divine scent of the Mongolian beef in the Styrofoam container on the seat beside her. The call had come in during dinner, forcing her box up more than half of her meal. Had she known what the night would bring, she would have gone for the shrimp with lobster sauce. The onions and peppers were murder on her digestive system.

“Thank you, Dr. Allen.” The officer passed back her credentials. “Pull into the lot to the left and follow the first row to the end. You’ll be able to see where to go from there.”

Lauren nodded and rolled up her window. The officer passed through her headlights and dragged aside the barricade long enough for her to pull through. She turned into the dirt lot as she’d been instructed and followed the uneven rows of older model cars, dirty pickup trucks, and a smattering of tractors toward the logjam to the east. Half a dozen vans were parked at the edge of the lot and in the weeds beside a path that led down into a copse of sycamores. The large Ford Econolines were stenciled with the names of their official offices, lest the drivers forget which one was theirs. Fulton County Coroner. The Evidence Collection Team from the Atlanta Police Department. Fulton County Sheriff’s Department. The two unmarked vans were designed to be inconspicuous, but instead only drew attention to themselves. At least she now knew that the FBI had commandeered the investigation, which meant that, with any luck, she’d be home by breakfast.

She parked behind one of the ECT vans, confident that they wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon, and walked around to her trunk, which she popped with the tap of a button on her keychain. Her positive-pressure personnel suit was folded neatly next to her oversize briefcase. She slipped the baggy gear over her smart skirt suit, sealed the plastic shield over her face and shoulder length blonde hair, and grabbed the plastic case. Perhaps her attire would prove to be overkill, but people tended to shy away from her and let her do her work in peace when she wore it, as though she were the one who was contagious.

The sodium halide glare from the east guided her through the sycamore grove. She intentionally walked in the grass beside the path so as not to disturb any potentially important footprints and strolled down the emerald knoll toward the source of the glow. She smelled the telltale stench of the early stages of decomposition and adjusted the flow of air through the suit’s filtration device.

A lone Lithium Springs Police Department cruiser was parked at the bottom of the hill. Poor rube must have been the first on the scene. Beyond it, the fairgrounds were littered with the trappings of a low-rent traveling circus. The obligatory red– and white-striped big top. Games of chance. Rickety rides more rust than metal. The entire inner grounds swarmed with law enforcement officers and forensics techs from every county, state, and federal entity. All of them wore masks, gloves, and generic yellow isolation smocks over their uniforms and suits. Silver-domed stadium lights were mounted to trees, tripods, and even the surrounding claptrap booths, all of them directed toward the massive tent.

Lauren encountered the first remains fifty yards out from the ticket booth, amid a scattering of trash. The body lay prone in the grass, arms pinned beneath it. Height, build, and apparel were all definitively male. A small fluorescent pink flag with the number one was staked into the ground near the man’s head. The weeds were tacky with blood and bodily dissolution. The smell was malodorous, but definitely fresh. He hadn’t been dead for more than three or four hours. The back of his head was lumpy and misshapen. His shaved scalp was only now beginning to stubble.

She crouched and inspected the soft tissue swelling over the base of his skull and his neck. Each knot was roughly the size of a half-dollar. She pressed the center of one, which dimpled under the slightest pressure. It took several seconds to resume its normal fluid-filled appearance after she removed her finger. In the middle of each one was a tiny black dot from which purplish-red striations originated like forked bolts of lightning. She lifted the collar of his shirt. More wounds covered his back, although in nowhere near the same concentration. The brunt of the attack had been confined to his head.

Easing her hands under his shoulder, she rolled him away from the ground to inspect his face. A waste of time. The features were so swollen and livid with settled blood that she couldn’t see more than the faint impression of a mouth, nose, and eyes. More black dots, more striations. She let the body roll flat again, opened her briefcase, and removed several items from their inserts. With a pair of sharp forceps, she gripped the end of one of the black dots and teased out what looked like a splinter, which she immediately placed in a collection bag. A globule of amber pustulates bloomed from the tiny hole. She used a syringe to capture it and drained the knot dry.

She closed her briefcase and resumed her trek toward the main tent. The silhouette of the ticket agent in the booth welcomed her. A flash from a criminalist’s camera revealed the deformed head.

Lauren passed through the gate and parted a sea of investigators. Forensics teams pored over every available surface in search of evidence. One even walked through the area with a digital video recorder in an attempt to capture the entire scene as they had found it. And it was definitely a massive scene. Corpses were everywhere on the hay-littered dirt, crumpled on their chests as though they had died even as they ran. Small pink flags marked their passing. They were marked with a series of numbers from twelve through twenty-eight. All of their heads were similarly swollen, parting their hair with odd cowlicks. Men, women, children. Most wore jeans and flannel shirts. Some of the women wore cheap dresses and scuffed high heel shoes, as though a night at the circus passed for high society in this rural section of Georgia.

A Sheriff’s Deputy waved her through the flaps and closed them again behind her. There was no dialing down the smell this time. The stench hit her in the gut and again she tasted her Mongolian beef, which had been much better the first time. Fortunately, she had dabbed enough perfume under her blouse that a shift of her shoulders released a bouquet of jasmine and lilac that almost spared her from the smell of death. Almost.

She stood in the main aisle and absorbed everything around her. Stadium bleachers had been erected in nearly a complete circle around the inside of the massive tent. From her vantage point, she could only see the metal support structures and the undersides of the wooden slats to either side, but the gaps overhead between the seats were filled with lower legs and feet. None of them moved. Directly ahead was the main ring. A group of suit-clad agents had gathered in the center under the tightrope and trapezes. Bodies littered the ground all around them. The spotlights still shined down on the carnage. There were performers of all kinds: the ornately-garbed ringmaster, young women in sequined leotards, animal handlers in elaborate costumes, filthy carnies, and a colorful assortment of painted clowns. A lion, a tiger, and a parade of elephants. All lifeless on the dirt, scattered as though a tornado had blown through. It was a truly mortifying sight.

One of the agents saw her and tipped his chin. He broke away from the others, strode directly toward her, and offered his gloved hand.

“Special Agent Maxwell Cranston,” he said. “And you must be Dr. Allen from the CDC.”

Lauren nodded and inspected him over his mask. He had dark eyes and hair slicked back with so much gel it seemed to absorb the scarlet glow from the lights strung up in the rafters. An air of confidence surrounded him. Unfortunately, that air reeked of the hundreds of corpses packed into the tent.

He gestured toward the center ring and fell into step beside her.

“Have you had a chance to examine any of the remains yet?” he asked.

“We both know the cause of death, but as far as the presence of any sort of communicable pathogen, we’re going to have to wait for a lab analysis of whatever samples I procure.”

They walked out from between the bleachers and Lauren gasped at the scope of the slaughter. The stadium seats were nearly filled to capacity. There had to be easily four hundred people collapsed on the metal slopes. Tangled in the aisles. Lying on top of one another. Clumped in mounds. She saw parents who had tried to shield their children with their bodies, elderly couples who had been trampled in the momentary stampede, baby carriages and wheelchairs, still occupied. These people had seen death coming, but had been unable to move fast enough to escape. Agents and officers in their isolation gear threaded through the masses, taking pictures and gathering whatever evidence they could find.

“From what I’ve seen,” Lauren said, “there are no outward signs of contagion, viral or bacterial. It doesn’t look like there was even enough time for anything to pass between them. That doesn’t necessarily rule out an infectious agent, though. If there’s anything in the samples, we’ll find it.”

“Then that ought to make your job here pretty easy.”

He glanced over at her. His mask stretched over a smile. There was obviously something he wasn’t telling her.

Cranston led her past the congregation of suits, whose voices lowered when she neared, and to the center of the ring. She recognized the massive bucket-shaped platforms the elephants used to rise to their full height and the man with the whip who encouraged them to do so. The tough, leathery hide had protected the elephants from the worst of the assault, yet their skin still bubbled with what looked like gray boils.

“We know the cause of death was the sheer number of bee stings to the head and face,” Cranston said. “We just don’t understand why they attacked like they did, why their stings were so toxic, or where they came from.”

One of the elephants was in much worse shape than the others. A gaping wound framed its abdomen, fringed by tatters of gray hide, viscera spilled out all over the ground. The bowels were thoroughly destroyed, torn apart.

Lauren could only stare at the mess. This was why she was here. Suddenly, she realized that she wouldn’t be going home anytime soon.

“I can tell you where they came from.” She pointed at the mess of entrails. “They chewed their way out of their host. A better question would be…where are they now?”

II

“Bees living in an elephant’s guts?” Cranston scoffed. “I don’t buy that for a second.”

“The evidence is right here at your feet,” Lauren said. She knelt over the viscera, removed a long pair of blunt forceps from her case, and tugged at the frayed mesentery. “Look at the edges. These aren’t clean incisions, nor are they ragged tears. You see how they almost appear serrated? That was caused by mastication. Think about how many insects it must have taken to kill this many people so quickly. There had to be hundreds of thousands of them, maybe millions. They didn’t just swarm in here through the tent flaps. I may not be an expert on bees, but I can’t imagine them behaving like that. No. That many individuals? They had to be brought here in some sort of vessel. And I think that’s exactly what we’re looking at here.”

“Your theory doesn’t stand to reason. How in the world do you propose someone was able to make a two-ton pachyderm swallow millions of bees? How would they survive inside of it?”

“That’s my job to figure out.” She glanced up at Cranston. “Have you already photographed this elephant?”

“Yeah…why?”

Lauren removed a scalpel from her briefcase and slit open a length of the small bowel like she was gutting a snake. The inner mucosa was wrinkled and slimy, and dotted with brownish chyme. She sifted through the sludge until she found what she was looking for, pinched it with the forceps, and extricated it from the ileum.

“What is it?” Cranston asked.

She held up the forceps so he could see the small insect. It had curled in upon itself, the nub where its stinger had been tucked over the top of its head. Its long, slender wings iridesced with orange under the spotlight. Its body was jet black with rings such a deep shade of crimson they were nearly indistinguishable. A diminutive orange petiole articulated the tiny thorax with an abdomen that hooked under like a scorpion’s tail in reverse. It had a triangular-shaped head with mandibles that looked like those of an ant on a much grander scale.

This was no bee.

Its body was more reminiscent of that of a wasp, sleek and dangerous, but wasps didn’t lose their stingers like bees, and bees were hairy to facilitate the collection of pollen.

She slid the carcass into a collection bag and passed it to Cranston, who held it close to his face to study it.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “When a bee loses its stinger, it dies shortly thereafter, right? This one lost its stinger and died inside the elephant. So where are all of their bodies? They should be everywhere.”

Lauren rose and snatched the bag back from him.

“They have to be somewhere around here. We just haven’t found them yet. While you’re looking, I’m going to see if I can figure out which species this might be, and how it ended up in the digestive tract of this animal.”

She had a hunch, but she wasn’t ready to share it. Not yet, anyway. Not until she knew for sure. And if she was right….

“Hey!” one of the gowned men called from the bleachers. He held a black rectangular object over his head. “Look what I found! And it’s still recording!”

He clambered over the bodies and descended to the leveled dirt. Cranston hurried over to meet him. Lauren followed. They were joined by the group of agents in short measure.

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.