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The Coyote
  • Текст добавлен: 8 сентября 2016, 21:58

Текст книги "The Coyote"


Автор книги: Michael McBride



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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

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 jogged 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-building 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.

Their antennae were dramatically different as well. Instead of having a long distal portion called a flagellum, which was ordinarily composed of eight discrete sections that helped the wasp recognize different sounds, there was only a small nub, which, they could only assume, was able to identify a single tone.

They were dealing with a wasp that looked like a hybridization of a paper wasp and a digger wasp, had the ovipositor of a honey bee connected to the parthenogenic reproductive system of a parasitic wasp, with oddly short antennae attuned to a particular resonance of sound, the mandibles of a termite, and weaker venom than any single one of its constituent components. A finely-tuned machine capable of infesting a host without immediate detriment…and of killing an entire crowd of spectators in a matter of seconds.

This species wasn’t the result of random mutation or selective breeding. This was something that could only have been engineered in a lab.

But how had it gone from that lab into the belly of a circus elephant? And how long had they been growing in its digestive tract?

The elephant hadn’t been attacked by a swarm. It would have been killed like everything else under the big top. It had to have been stung repeatedly under controlled conditions for so many eggs to have hatched inside of it. The elephant’s sickly affect prior to its death had to have been caused by the mature insects that surely must have been crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in its bowels. It wouldn’t have been able to eat or defecate. The wasps had been causing it to slowly starve to death while they waited for the stimulus that triggered them to chew their way out of its gut.

Everyone at the fairgrounds last night had been killed by someone who had invested a tremendous amount of time and resources into the creation and release of the wasps. Not just killed, but murdered in a cold, calculating manner that had taken countless years of hard work in a laboratory far more advanced than even Lauren’s to plan and implement.

That was why they all now worked as fast and as diligently as they could.

They needed to figure out the motive behind using the wasps to murder hundreds of people at a circus in a town that barely warranted inclusion on the map.

Everything hinged upon it.

They needed to know why.



II


Lauren checked in with Special Agent Cranston just before noon and relayed her findings. He sounded less surprised than she had expected. His team had already identified the majority of the faceless decedents based primarily on the driver’s licenses they found in the purses and wallets either on or near the remains. They were in the process of crosschecking the names against employment records in hopes of stumbling upon a motive while simultaneously bagging and tagging the corpses. CDC transport vehicles were running back and forth, hauling the bodies by the truckload to their quarantine station downstairs near the construction zone. Lauren imagined them stacked like corded wood against the rear wall in the warehouse-size chamber, in the space they had cleared by moving all of the stretchers out of the curtained partitions. Cranston had promised to sic his best dogs on the genetically engineered angle to determine which facilities were capable of pulling off something this ambitious.

In the meantime, she needed to scrutinize the samples. If the wasps had developed inside of the elephant, then it was definitely possible that they were growing inside of the hundreds of corpses they were unloading at this very moment. The last thing they wanted was their entire quarantine room swarming with wasps. And yet, at the same time, they did need to focus on the lifecycle of the insects, which undoubtedly meant they needed an experimental cross-section to hatch.

She shuddered at the thought of willingly allowing one of the corpses to become infested and torn apart on her table while she leaned over it in a beekeeper’s suit.

Right now, a team of medical examiners was autopsying every tenth body. Thus far, the results were all the same. Their deaths were the result of the sheer amount of venom that hit the victims’ bloodstreams at once, leading to anaphylactic shock. Their windpipes had closed due to the natural histamine reactions of their immune systems. In essence, they had all asphyxiated as one.

Blood was the key. It pumped through a complex highway of vessels that connected the heart to every organ, from arteries to arterioles and finally into the tiny capillaries that ran just beneath the surface of the skin and back again through venules and veins. This was the route that nearly every pathogenic microbe used to reach its ultimate destination inside the body. Airborne viruses accessed it through the mucus membranes in the respiratory tract and directly through the lungs. For other diseases, all it took was a simple transfer of fluids, or, in some cases, just the slightest physical contact or a passing of germs via a fomite like a doorknob. In this case, she suspected the wasps laid their eggs subcutaneously, and upon hatching, the larvae traveled through the blood into the digestive system where there was room to grow in the nutrient-rich maze of hollow tubes, in much the same fashion as tapeworms.

She studied the blood samples through an electron microscope on slides her lab assistants had prepared. Whole blood had been treated with heparin to prevent coagulation, while other samples had been centrifuged, which broke them down into their individual components. The skin and superficial samples of the human remains had all reflected what one would expect from a wasp sting. Nothing more, nothing less. The elephant’s bowels had also been relatively normal, minus the sections where the ovipositors had become impaled in the lining. The mucosa had been dramatically inflamed in the immediate vicinity of the stingers, but there was no sign of infection or other physiological reaction, which suggested that the wasps had merely been content to develop inside of the animal until the external stimulus triggered the instinct that caused them to chew their way out. Eventually, the elephant would have starved to death, had it not been gutted from within first.

The sample of blood she now studied under 1000x magnification was from the man she had encountered on the lawn outside the fairgrounds, the bald man who’d been designated Number One by the pink flag near his head. He had presumably been nearest the exit flaps of the big top when everything had started to happen and made a break for it. He hadn’t even made it a hundred yards. His blood was fairly common, which made him a good test subject. O positive. Clear toxicology screen, minus the preponderance of melittin. Standard increase in white blood cells to combat the sudden onslaught. Normal red blood cell and platelet counts. The only thing they found that shouldn’t have been there were the small white ovals that vaguely resembled the platelets, only they were about a hundred times larger and less prevalent by a factor of ten thousand. Extrapolating the sample size to that of the entire bloodstream still intimated that there were hundreds of thousands of what she assumed to be egg sacs floating through the host.

Further magnification of the white ovals confirmed they had no method of locomotion. No flagella or cilia. They were at the mercy of the current. They appeared to be encapsulated in some sort of gelatinous protein coating with a mucus-like consistency that prevented it from sticking to any of the blood cells, the vessel lumen, or the other egg sacs. If that was indeed what they were. At this point, she could only speculate.

Lauren replaced the whole blood slide with one featuring the white dots exclusively. They’d been centrifuged to isolate them and placed in a saline solution. She wanted to test an idea that had been percolating in her head. The pH of blood was slightly basic—roughly 7.4—in comparison to that of the digestive tract. The small bowel maintained a slightly more acidic pH level of approximately 6.6, but that was nothing compared to the stomach, which pumped out gastric acid with a pH of under 2. Enteric drugs like acetaminophen and ibuprofen were coated with gelatin to ensure that the active ingredients wouldn’t be released until they hit the stomach, where they would be absorbed as they progressed through the small bowel.

“Prepare a point five percent solution of hydrochloric acid,” she said. “That should approximate the acidity of the stomach. And set up another slide with several of the egg sacs.”

Lauren slid the slide out and waited for the new one. She scooted back from the video monitor attached to the microscope and turned it so they would all be able to see the reaction.

One of her assistants passed her a slide with an indentation the size of a thumbprint in the center. The sample was nearly invisible until she locked it into place under the lens. She focused on what looked like a cluster of white grapes, then increased the magnification until they filled the screen.

She leaned back from the monitor and felt the others crowd around her. All sounds of activity died. The resultant silence was marred only by the sounds of excited breathing and the hum of machinery.

Another assistant appeared at her side, holding the dilution she had requested.

Lauren gave him approval to proceed with a nod, and focused on the image on the screen.

The lens drew out of focus as the tip of a glass pipette appeared. A globule of fluid shivered and fell away. Then another. The cluster of eggs floated apart, then began to effervesce. The outer coating disintegrated into a fine white particulate mist. In the center of each, a dark shape drew contrast. It looked like a ring at first, before slowly opening into a C-shape. The remainder of the egg sac dissolved, leaving only a pale halo in the fluid around the larvae, like the whites of broken eggs around the yolks.

The larvae all started to wriggle at once, worming back and forth through the acidic solution.

“My God,” Lauren whispered.

Blood flowed through the human body at a rate of anywhere between one-tenth of a centimeter per second in the peripheral vessels to forty centimeters per second near the trunk.

Conservative estimates suggested it had taken less than two minutes for the venom to trigger the fatal reaction that had caused all of the people in the tent to asphyxiate.

That was more than enough time for the eggs to pass through the bloodstream and enter the gastrointestinal tract, where they had been sitting in a puddle of stomach acid for more than sixteen hours now.

She imagined the massive quarantine room. It was negatively pressurized to prevent the air inside the chamber from contaminating the outside air. Was it sealed tightly enough that nothing could crawl out through the ducts?

She pictured the rows of body bags and the remains inside of them, their bowels expanding with the gasses of decomposition and teeming with wasp larvae.

She envisioned the corpses still lying in the field, out in the open, and the group of agents working the scene around them. The bowels churning even beneath the graying flesh.

And worst of all, she imagined a swarm of wasps hundreds of times the size of the one that had eaten through the elephant and killed every patron in the stands in a matter of seconds rolling over the suburbs of Atlanta like a storm cloud.


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