by Tim Curran
And on and on it went and Gloria still barely made a living.
Of course, if Lance would get a job...
But no, she wasn’t going to go there. Not today. She was cold. She was tired. Her back was aching. She needed a meal and a hot bath. If she got herself worked up about it, she’d just go home and start bitching at him about it all. And if Lance was drunk (not a matter of if, she told herself, but to what degree), there’d be a fight. An all-nighter. In the end he’d go out and get more drunk and she’d sleep on the couch.
No, she wasn’t going to let that happen.
Not today.
She pulled to a stop before her building, filled with anger and self-pity despite herself. She stepped out of the car and made herself take a deep breath. Tried to purge the tension. She didn’t want to fight today.
He’s probably not home anyway, she thought dismally. He’s probably out getting wasted. It’s what he does best.
Their marriage had deteriorated significantly in the past few years. She liked to think it was Lance’s fault, but maybe it was hers, too. Maybe she just didn’t care anymore. Maybe she was simply out of sympathy for him. He’d had it tough, she knew that. But since he’d gotten back from Iraq... things had just gone to shit. They were both shocked when his National Guard unit was activated and sent over there. Their marriage had been so good up to that point. Just before he’d left she’d gotten pregnant. While he was in Saudi for desert training, she found out via the ultrasound that it was a boy. She’d never been so happy. Or so worried that Lance wouldn’t return.
Then she’d miscarried.
A year later, Lance came home. He’d brought with him a serious drinking problem. A changed man, all he did was drink and complain and bitch about his health problems. He was certain he had a variety of undiagnosed illnesses due to his exposure to chemical weapons in Iraq. Yet, he refused to wade through the red tape at the VA that would have started a program of treatment. Instead, he drank and refused to work.
What a guy.
By the time she’d made it to the second floor and was turning the key in the lock, she was feeling very bitter. Very betrayed. By life. By fate. By Lance. Particularly by Lance.
Healthy enough to suck down a case of beer every day, but not healthy enough to work for a living.
Goddamn you, Lance. If you were working full time, making a decent wage, we could be doing all right.
Her face felt hot and tight. If he was home, he’d know she was pissed soon as she walked in the door. It was going to be fight night and she couldn’t stop it now. She slammed the door shut and stood there, boiling.
Her voice full of acid, she cried out: “Lance? Lance?”
Her voice echoed through the apartment. He wasn’t in the living room. Passed out in the bedroom? Puking in the bathroom? Drinking in the kitchen? No, none of the above. The TV wasn’t on. If he was home, the TV would be on. Even if he wasn’t watching it, it was always on.
Gloria dropped her keys on the couch and kicked her shoes off. She grabbed a pair of sweats and stopped. Stopped dead. There was curious, unsettling feeling in her belly. A sense of... what? Dread? She shook her head and went into the bathroom.
What the hell was this?
The bathroom smelled like smoke. Cigarette smoke. There was a butt floating in the toilet. Ashes in the sink. Lance didn’t smoke. Maybe one of his drunken buddies... except he didn’t have any of those either. On the floor around the toilet and spilling down the sides of the bowl like some child’s finger-painting was a viscous yellow slime. It had the consistency of vomit... but it was like no vomit she’d ever seen before. Lance must’ve thrown up.
She turned away, disgusted.
There was a man standing behind her.
Gloria nearly jumped out of her socks. She gripped the sink for support, a cold wave rushing through her chest.
The man was dressed in a shiny, black raincoat. His eyes were dead and gray like scum-filled pools. A scar ran down across his neck. “Quite a mess in here, eh?” he said.
Gloria stumbled past him, stepping out of the bathroom, fear like a knife in her belly. Her lips trembled. “Who... who the hell are you?”
“I’m a friend of your husband,” he said, very calmly, almost emotionlessly. “He’s very sick, poor guy.”
“You can’t be here. I could call the—”
“Police? No, you can’t do that.”
Two men had joined him. They must’ve been hiding in the bedroom closet, it occurred to Gloria in some part of her brain that wasn’t screaming in raw terror.
She turned to bolt into the bathroom where, survival instinct told her, she could lock herself in. Gloved hands grabbed her and slammed her against the wall. Before she had recovered, a syringe was inserted into her neck. Her head reeling and her body gone to rubber, the two men dumped her into the tub. One of them held her up while the other slid a thick plastic bag over her head and tightened it about her throat.
She tried to scream then, but all that came out was a garbled, meaty sound. She thought madly that this couldn’t be, that this wasn’t right, that her life really wasn’t all that bad—
Then a nine millimeter slug turned her brain to bloody mucilage.
And then there was only darkness. No worries.
6:17 PM
The Biological Containment Team came up the stairs.
They were wearing their white biosuits, but unlike before, this time there was a logo in brilliant red letters in the middle of their backs: JACK’S PRESSURE CLEANING. They carried their hoods under their arms. They passed people in the corridors, but no one paid any real attention. Just a couple of cleaners, they thought, in their starched white uniforms. The ruse worked perfectly.
The BCT was made up of three individuals.
Lieutenant Holliman, Sergeant Ramirez, and Corporal Spokes. Unlike Cave and his cleaners, these were the actual names of the team members. They were with an Army NBC unit out of Fort Detrick, Maryland, but were on permanent loan to the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command who jobbed them out to another agency.
When Cave or any of the others spoke to them, the three were addressed by their ranks. Nothing more. Neither Cave nor Stein nor McKenna knew their names. They were on loan to an agency that thrived on anonymity.
It was the way things worked.
When Holliman and the others reached the apartment on the second floor, Cave was waiting for them.
“She’s in the bathroom,” he said. “There’s some weird shit on the floor. Like slime.”
The lieutenant nodded. He and the others donned their hoods. Ramirez unfolded a vinyl body bag. They got right to work.
“Our plane leaves in twenty minutes,” Cave said to McKenna and Stein.
He went to watch the containment team and McKenna rolled his eyes. Stein smiled but said nothing. If you wanted to survive in the business, you learned to say nothing. You did not comment on your work or the work of others. You did not ask questions. You did the job you were ordered to do and left it at that. You did not worry about how what you did might have ruined lives. You did not try to figure out the big picture. That was for guys like the Old Man. And even though you wanted to know real bad what these people were infected with, you didn’t ask. And you weren’t told. That’s how it worked. If they told you there was no risk of infection to you, you had to believe them. If they said it wasn’t contagious, then it wasn’t.
And outwardly, that’s just how you acted.
Like none of it bothered you one bit.
Even if, deep inside where no one could see, you were scared shitless.
Cave came back, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “Control says we’re done in the Big Apple. This one makes twelve stops.”
“Shit,” McKenna said, “I didn’t even get to Manhattan.”
“Where next?” Stein asked him.
“Chicago.”
McKenna wanted to say, it’s there too, then. But he didn’t dare. It was funny how something
not contagious seemed to be all over the goddamn place. Boston. Atlanta. Dallas. Denver. Washington. New York. Now Chicago. Funny. He just had to remember that Cave had assured him there was no danger of contagion. Just as the Old Man had assured Cave. So there was nothing to worry about.
McKenna thought about Chicago.
It made his skin go cold.
AUGUST 18
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA:
CBT BIOSAFETY LEVEL FOUR: THE CAGE
7:10 P.M.
Once she was properly fitted in a one-piece positive-pressure biohazard suit with its own life support system, helmet on and air supply running, it was time to go in. Dr. Evans guided her down the dim, deadly corridor. Like him, she was dressed in a green Tyvek biosuit, rubber boots, and multi-layered surgical gloves. She rarely came down here, but Evans—the biogeneticist who had done most of the groundwork for what would come to be known as Project BioGenesis—had called to tell her that he was running a hot trial on an infected host who was on the verge of biological meltdown.
“It’s something you should really see,” he told her, excited at the prospect. “It gives one perspective and an appreciation for the survivability of our particular GMO.”
Elizabeth had very little interest in seeing any of it, but it was too late to get squeamish. This was the egg she had brooded over, the one she’d sold to the Defense Department for mega-bucks, and now it was hatching. Time to be a proud mother hen and see what she had wrought.
To think it had all led to this. To this unpleasant place. All the striving and hard work, scheming and duplicity of her steady crawl up the corporate ladder to the highest rung had brought her here—to a position of unprecedented power where she was about to witness something horrendous, something horrible which would haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life.
Again, too late to be squeamish, she told herself.
And she knew damn well that in her position at CBT, that she could never, ever afford to show any weakness. Her enemies were many. They were always looking for something to exploit. And besides, those whom she answered to expected her to oversee every facet of the project.
No, not expected, demanded.
Biosafety Level Four at CBT was known as The Cage to those who worked in it, but was technically referred to as the MCL, Maximum Containment Lab. By the older designation it was P-4 for the highest pathogen protection level, though that had fallen out of favor of late. It was replaced by the terminology BSL-4 (Biosafety Level 4) or BL-4 (Biological Level 4) in the industry. It was three levels below ground and very few CBT employees even knew it existed. It was a claustrophobic run of narrow corridors, airlocks, decon showers, autoclaves, and HEPA filters. The sealed modular work rooms and labs were designed to keep anything, even the minutest viral particle, from escaping.
It was, Elizabeth thought, a very oppressive sort of place. The biosuits increased that sensation, of course. Some people simply couldn’t take it and began having panic attacks almost immediately. Then there were others like Evans and his staff that thrived in the secret, high-security underground lair of hot bioorganisms and lethal genetically engineered life forms.
Elizabeth was not 100% comfortable down there. She was very aware of the confining suit and what a tear in the fabric might mean. In the case of an accident, the entire area would be sealed off until invasive biocontainment operations were complete.
She swallowed, listening to the hum of the blower that cycled fresh air into her helmet. Though she was not warm (The Cage was kept quite cool), sweat trickled down her temples and her faceplate fogged with her breath.
If the public ever found out about any of this, the Nuremberg Trials would be like a day in the park in comparison.
Once the decon cycle of chemical showers was complete, Evans led her through the airlock past rooms where techs labored over their scopes and slides. A maze of interconnecting corridors brought them to another airlock. Steps led below. Down here were two things: the freezers that housed the frozen zoo of deadly pathogens and experimental organisms, and the chambers where biological weapons were tested. The corridor angled off to the right, then the left.
Here it was.
Elizabeth stood there, breathing the stale air of her suit. Before her were a series of chambers much like cages in a zoo. Each were walled with one-way glass which allowed the occupants to be watched and studied. Only one was occupied and in it was a woman.
“This animal,” Evans said, “has been here four days. She’s at the end of her life cycle.”
Animal. That was the word he used and it gave Elizabeth a chill. She supposed that given the nature of the work down here, it was better to refer to all test subjects, whether man, monkey, or dog, as test as animals. Psychologically, it probably made things easier.
The woman was probably in her mid-thirties. She was naked and in great distress. She stumbled back and forth, slamming her hands against the walls, crying out. Sometimes sobbing and sometimes screaming hysterically. Dark hair was webbed to her face with sweat. She was shaking, her abdomen grotesquely swollen. Blood had leaked from her nipples and was smeared over her body.
And Elizabeth thought, I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to know about this part of it.
By the end of the week, this would be happening to thousands of people across the country. The very idea sickened her and made the blood drain down into her feet. And this when she thought she was far beyond being able to feel anything as pedestrian as common human decency.
The woman dropped to her knees and vomited out a discharge of watery bile. It was hard to know at this juncture whether she was even aware of what was happening to her. Field trials had proven that the subjects were generally irrational by this point.
Now the woman stood up. She pawed the hair away from her face, revealing a pallid complexion and eyes that were red as rubies, as if every blood vessel in them had exploded. Her lips curled away from her teeth and she began making gagging, croaking noises that rose in volume and intensity. It was hard to believe human vocal cords could produce such sounds.
She went down, contorting and jerking, limbs whipsawing back and forth, head drumming against the floor. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, blood running from her mouth and bubbling from her nostrils. Her fingers were the claws of an animal that tore frantically at her belly—there was something in her and she knew it. Something was doing this to her and she wanted it out. Her nails raked her skin, leaving red streaks across her pale abdomen.
Evans was timing it all. “And it should happen… now,” he said.
The woman squirmed on the floor like a human larva, wriggling and writhing in her own waste. She made a series of hissing, slithering sounds. The popping and snapping of her joints was clearly audible. She arched her back, screaming and expelling a fine mist of blood. Every muscle and tendon was strained tight. They were like cords under her skin. Beneath the flesh of her belly something moved. The woman gyrated faster and faster and then she… exploded.
There was no other word for it as she literally burst open with a wet, tearing sound, expelling tissues and organs and steaming fluids. Blood and matter sprayed against the glass along with hundreds of marble-sized objects. Split open on the floor like a spawning fish, the eggs gushed out of her in ropy clusters. Then something else came out of her, dislocating her jaw as it fought free.
“Jesus,” Elizabeth said, turning away.
“It’s unpleasant the first time you see it,” Evans said. Behind the plastic bubble of his helmet, his face was impassive. “All right, let’s start decon. Wrap this up!”
The test chamber was sprayed with toxic chemicals. Soon everything was dead, even that which was designed to survive at all costs.
Elizabeth walked down the corridor, then she slumped against the wall, breathing heavily. This was it then. This was what BioGen had unleashed on the world.
AUGUST 20
CHICAGO: PORTAGE PARK
2:34 P.M.
Strung out on caffeine and a
mphetamines, Shawna Geddes sat on a peeling bench and waited for God. Because when he showed she had a few questions to put to him. She dearly wanted to know if he was pulling the strings of her life or if she was merely fucking up all on her own. It would’ve been nice to believe that everything was predestined. It would have been comforting. Because if it wasn’t, if it wasn’t... well, then she was every bit the screw-up her mother promised her she would be.
Ultimately, she knew the truth.
Just like she knew God wouldn’t be showing up today. No doubt he’d long ago washed his hands of her. The thought, though not surprising, was somehow unsettling. It made her feel very alone.
So, I’ve taken a few drugs, she thought. Ruined a few marriages. What of it? What does that make me?
She stopped thinking about that before any answers came.
She lit a cigarette and checked her watch. No, God wasn’t coming today, but the man she was waiting for was twenty minutes late. She’d checked her watch five times in as many minutes. Repeated viewing wasn’t making those hands move any goddamn faster.
“C’mon, Harry,” she snarled under her breath and flicked her ash into the wind.
A little league game was going on across the way and Shawna watched the proceedings with a dull gaze. The mothers and fathers cheered. Grandparents clung to the wire fence. Toddlers played in the dirt. It all seemed so foolishly, hopelessly boring and normal that she began to cry.
Chin up, she told herself silently. You’re okay. Too much coffee. Too many speeders. Not enough sleep and when the hell was the last time you ate?
She honestly couldn’t remember.
The last memory she had of food was two days before. Linguini with white clam sauce at Sapori Trattoria in Lincoln Park. That was it. Richard had wined and dined her... then broke off their relationship.
Oh, she’d seen it coming.
