The Calm Before The Swarm (3 page)

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.

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.

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.