The Calm Before The Swarm (8 page)

The man they knew as Dipak Patel had
received an incoming call on his disposable cell phone while he was
still inside the transport vehicle with the four Marines. One of
them remembered thinking it odd that the screen had lit up, but
there had been no ringing sound. It had taken a full sixty
traumatizing minutes for the wasps to die, with only the thick
fabric of their suits and Patel's body to sting.

No political demands had been made. No
organizations had claimed responsibility. No rumors abounded on the
internet. It was a perfectly coordinated plan with a motive cloaked
in mystery.

More than five hundred people were dead
already, and yet it felt like they were just marking the seconds
until disaster finally struck on an almost apocalyptic scale.

Lauren pressed the power button. While she
waited for the picture on the flat screen to bloom, she lined up
the EpiPens on the coffee table and neurotically checked their
expiration dates.

Her landline started to ring. A heartbeat
later, so did her cell phone. Her pager followed and she heard the
chime of incoming email from her laptop. By the time the television
came to life, she already knew what must have happened.

An expansive overhead shot of Disney World.
She saw the Magic Castle and Main Street USA, and the thousands of
corpses lying on the asphalt, stretching as far as the eye could
see.

"...
in an unprecedented swarming attack
that has apiologists struggling to explain...
"

She changed the channel.

"...
witnessing this live from Times
Square...
"

More bodies. Everywhere. Smoke roiled over
the street from behind the shattered windows of upscale
storefronts.

Again, she changed the channel.

"...
on what authorities now speculate may
have been a coordinated strike by...
"

Men and women in suits littered Capitol
Hill. Papers blew from open briefcases, the only sign of movement
on the jerky footage, obviously shot from a helicopter.

"...
have just learned that a radical
Jihadist group has claimed responsibility...
"

She clapped her hands over her ears to block
out the ringing and beeping and chiming and the awful words of the
frantic reporters. She saw images of the Mall of the Americas, the
Vegas Strip, Atlantic City, Pike Place in Seattle. All locations
that had defined America in life, now marked her passing. Bourbon
Street, the San Diego Zoo, Centennial Olympic Park...

Lauren closed her eyes for a long moment
before opening them once more.

She rose from the couch as if in a trance,
walked to the front door, and pressed her eye to the peephole. The
wood vibrated against her palms.

A black cloud swelled over the horizon,
obliterating the midtown skyline, rushing outward over the units on
the other side of the park.

Lauren ran for the safety of the mosquito
netting and her protective suit as the ravenous thunderhead
devoured her condo with a buzzing sound that drowned out her
screams.

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"Cash up front," Anders said as soon as the
door swung inward.

"We only have three thousand," the old man
who answered said. He stood at the edge of the light from the
hallway and the darkness from within, trapped in that transition
zone of shadows. The wrinkles on his face were exaggerated by the
contrast, his liver spots like amoebae on a lab slide.

"Then I suggest you use it to buy a casket,"
Anders said, turning away from the door and starting back down the
dim corridor toward the stairs.

"Wait!" the old man called after him. Then
more softly, "Please."

Anders stopped, but didn't turn around.

"The fee is five thousand. Not a penny
less."

"Times are hard. The recession is---"

"Surely of no consequence compared to the
value of your wife's life."

The old man was silent.

"Call me when you have the rest of the
money," Anders said, again starting forward.

There were mumbled words from behind him.

Anders stopped and turned around. "Did you
say something, Mr. Proctor?"

"I said I have the rest of the money. I have
your five grand."

Anders turned and stared down the ratty
hallway at the old man, past yellowed walls and broken light
fixtures, past abused doors missing most of the trim, and shook his
head in sorrow. Even now, it seemed, the value of life was
negotiable. They were all the same, trying to haggle down a price
he hadn't set because he needed the money, but because he wanted
his clients to have to sacrifice to know the value of what they
had. He walked back down the threadbare hallway and stopped in
front of the door.

"I'm sorry," Proctor said, his eyes falling
to the ground, tears streaming through his canyon-like wrinkles. He
pulled a wad of bills, folded in half and rubber-banded, from his
right front pocket, and another from beneath his waistband.

Anders took the money and shoved it into the
interior pocket of his weathered trench coat. His wet bangs hung in
front of his blue eyes, sapped with melting snow; three days worth
of brown scruff on his cheeks at odds with his pale skin. Crossing
the threshold into the dark apartment, he waited for the old man to
guide him. The entire place reeked of sepsis---a smell with which he
was becoming far too intimate---like feces mixed with vomit and
heated to a burbling sludge. Beneath, the smells of antiseptics and
burnt toast lingered.

"I didn't mean to..." Proctor said. "I mean...we
can't even afford to pay our rent---"

"Where is she?" Anders interrupted.

The old man opened his mouth like he was
going to say something, but then turned and headed past the kitchen
into the living room. A faint glow emanated from the television in
the corner of the room on stacked concrete blocks, playing nothing
but static.

"We can't afford cable," the man said. "She
finds this comforting though."

Anders nodded and advanced into the dark
room. There was a coffee table in front of a long couch, covered
with scattered magazines and a bowl crusted with vomit.

"What's her name?" he asked, stopping beside
the couch and staring down at the emaciated figure piled beneath
tattered blankets that had definitely seen better days.

"Margaret," Proctor whispered from directly
behind him.

Anders knelt beside the woman and pulled the
blankets off of her torso and draped them over her legs. The body
beneath was little more than a living skeleton, tight manila skin
stretched over protruding bones, save for the abdomen, which looked
bloated and malnourished. What little remained of her gray hair was
streaked back over her scalp with her beaded sweat and littered the
pillow beneath her. He couldn't tell if she was conscious or simply
unable to close her eyes all the way, but sickly yellow crescents
stared out at him from sunken and bruised sockets. Her thin lips
were stretched back from her bare brown teeth as though she was in
tremendous pain.

"Hi, Margaret," Anders whispered, reaching
for the top button on her bile-stained blouse.

"Don't---" Proctor said, but Anders cut him off
with a sharp look and continued unbuttoning her top until he could
lay it to either side. Her ribs poked out like a starved dog's, her
breasts wrinkled into leathery folds of dried skin.

"What's her diagnosis?" Anders asked, pulling
back the sleeves of his jacket and reaching into one of the outer
pockets of his coat, producing a small wooden case, barely larger
than a deck of cards.

"Hepatocarcinoma secondary to lung cancer,"
Proctor said as he watched Anders set the case on his wife's
sternum.

"Liver cancer?"

"It's everywhere..."

Anders unlatched the small clasp and opened
the lid. Inside were half a dozen sugar cubes and two thin steel
cylinders about the width of a pencil, one of them capped with a
surgical blade.

"You don't have to watch this," Anders said,
removing the two pieces of metal and screwing them together to form
a scalpel.

"I've been watching her die for so long now...I
can't imagine anything worse."

"Suit yourself."

Anders removed three sugar cubes from the
case and set them beside the woman on the couch. He leaned forward
and raised the fold of flesh that was her left breast with his left
hand and brought the tip of the knife to her skin.

"What are you---?"

"Shh!" He pushed down the scalpel until blood
swelled up around it, a single drop racing away down her ribs. With
a practiced hand, he carved a small square and placed the first
sugar cube right in the middle, carefully lowering her breast back
down to hold it in place. He did the same thing on the right,
wiping his bloody fingertips across her stomach. Using both hands,
he felt along the lower border of her ribs on her right, pushing
firmly beneath until he isolated her liver. Marking the spot with
his left hand, he carved another square where his middle finger had
been and placed the remaining cube in the center.

He positioned his hands precisely between the
three points and closed his eyes. His lips moved over soundless
words, spoken in his mind where only he could hear them. After an
eternal moment...he opened his eyes. The white cubes began to slowly
darken from the bottom up, filling with a greenish-brown fluid that
amplified the horrendous stench in the room.

"What do you do with it...you know, when you
get it all out?" Proctor asked.

"Your wife will be well. What more do you
need to know?"

"I mean...do you just throw it away?"

Anders allowed himself a meek smile. "If only
it were that easy."

The cubes were now so full that fluid began
to puddle atop them.

He took a deep breath and blew it all the way
out, taking his time doing so. Closing his eyes again, he pried the
first cube from under her breast and threw it into his mouth. He
gagged and retched, heaving, but swallowed it down. He tried to
focus his mind on something else---anything else---but there was no
chance of ignoring the awful taste of the sugar as it slid down
into his stomach. He grabbed the second and tossed it back, already
palming the third as he tried to swallow. It felt like everything
in his stomach was already rising in revolt.

"Not yet," he whispered, shoveling the third
into his mouth and swallowing as forcefully as he could.

The scar tissue had already filled in the
squares on the woman's skin, leaving tender pink bubbles that would
stay with Margaret through the remainder of a life that had just
become much longer.

Anders leapt to his feet, knocking the coffee
table onto its side. He swayed there momentarily to regain his
equilibrium and slapped his hand over his mouth. He bent back over
and snatched his case and scalpel and jammed them into his
pocket.

His cheeks bulged outward with the force of
the fluids exploding from his guts.

"Thank you," Proctor said, trying to take
Anders's right hand to shake it, but the younger man just lowered
his shoulder and plowed right through him, sending him careening to
the floor.

Anders staggered through the darkness,
finally finding the door to the hallway and yanking it open. He was
barely a couple of steps into the hallway when he sprayed a flume
of vomit through his fanned fingers, shaking it to fling the
remainder onto the dirty carpet. It felt as though his insides were
being liquefied, the acids in his stomach churning ferociously. He
needed to get the disease back out before it started to take
root.

A "Closed for Repairs" sign hung on the
elevator, but it wasn't fooling anyone. It was the same all across
town. With the escalating cost of electricity, elevators were a
luxury only the elite could afford.

Shouldering through the door next to it, he
stumbled down the stairs with the smell of urine all around him. He
held tightly to the railing as his weak knees repeatedly gave out,
forcing him to catch himself before tumbling down to the next
landing. Time lost all meaning in the grip of such phenomenal pain.
He wasn't sure how many floors he had passed or how many he had
left until he reached the bottom and there were no more stairs to
descend. He thrust his hip against the release bar and nearly
knocked the rust-spotted metal door off its hinges.

"Oh God," he moaned, collapsing to all fours
in the snow on the sidewalk and heaving a steamy mess of bile onto
the accumulation. Grabbing a handful of snow, he shoved it in his
mouth to try to chase the taste of feces from his tongue.

A streetlamp towered over him, beside it an
overflowing trash can. The wind chased newspaper pages and plastic
bags down the center of the snow-covered street, marred only by the
sparse tracks of the few cars still left on the roads with gas
prices as they were. Anders crawled until he could reach the
wire-mesh receptacle and used it to drag himself to his feet. He
vomited into the trash can and forced himself to continue down the
street.

He had to move faster. This was an aggressive
disease that waged an internal war on his body's defenses, which it
was already winning handily.

Faceless people shuffled past him down the
street, bundled in rotting clothing and fraying scarves, walking
not because they had somewhere to be, but simply for the warmth
that moving provided. Not so long ago, the apartments rising into
the sky to either side of the road had been filled to capacity with
waiting lists as long as his arm. Now, only the penthouse suites
were formally occupied, while the street trash did everything they
possibly could to crawl through broken windows and pry away the
graffiti-laden plywood, if only to bed down inside for a single
night.