by Jack Hunt
He answered without hesitating. “Figured I could help.”
“Yeah, and why’s that?”
He shrugged.
“Because they think he had something to do with it,” Vanessa spat out.
Jenna was all over her. “I told you not to say anything.”
Wayne laughed. “Did you now?”
“They deserve answers, Jenna.”
“Damn right we do.”
“Is it true?” Hal asked. Miles clenched his jaw as he scanned his mirrors. He could tell where this was heading, especially after not finding Bailee.
He nodded. “It’s true.”
“Do you know?”
“Not any more than any of you do.”
“That’s not what the colonel thinks,” Vanessa said.
“Yeah, well I guess they got it wrong.”
The last person he expected to hear from was his wife but with the rest of them peppering him with questions, she decided to throw in one of her own.
“The colonel said that a video message sent to you prior to the raid on Donnie’s home gave them enough evidence to link you to the outbreak.”
Miles glanced at her in the rearview mirror. He was driving south when he slammed the brakes on. All of them lurched forward in their seats. He turned and looked at them all. “A message?”
“What’s this about a message?” Hal asked.
“My phone,” Miles said lost in thought.
“So you know about this message?” Wayne said in an accusing manner.
“I never saw it because Jenna took my phone before we arrived.”
“That true?” Hal asked.
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you check it?”
“Because the towers were down.”
“They’re not now,” Molly said. “They’ve been up awhile. Not a great signal but it’s something. I didn’t manage to get through to my folks but Nate did.”
Miles stared at them, then jerked the wheel around and floored the accelerator.
“Okay, uh, why are we heading back to Gerlach?” Abe asked.
“To get my phone.”
“Are you serious?” Wayne asked.
“I need that phone.”
“And I need to not go through what we just went through.”
He slammed the brakes on again and they all clung to the seats for dear life. “You want answers. Yeah? Well so do I. And the only way we are going to get them is to get that phone, see that message before the communication goes back down again.”
“Oh. I was good with just blaming you,” Wayne said.
Everyone else groaned.
Miles scowled as he stabbed his foot at the accelerator and they continued on.
Gerlach was ablaze. It looked a shell of its former self. Not all of it could have been attributed to burners, the military had set off explosions causing excessive damage. Windows shattered, walls blown out, bodies dotted around the streets like litter. As they sped into the lot, Abe bellowed out, “We’ll cover you while you get it. Just make it quick.”
“Don’t worry. I plan on it.” Miles hopped out and slid into the passenger side. The windows were shattered, someone had been rooting through it. Behind him gunfire erupted as Abe and the others used what little ammo they had remaining to hold back the surge of burners.
“Where the hell is it?” he hollered to Jenna.
Jenna jumped out. “I put it in the center console.”
“Yeah, well it’s not there now.”
“It has to be.” She came and slipped into the driver’s seat and began rummaging through receipts, makeup and God knows what else she’d jammed in there.
“Hurry it up. There’s too many,” Nate yelled.
Out the corner of his eye, he saw Hal front kick a guy and unload a round into his skull. Molly was tackled by two but saved by Wayne who was on top of the Humvee. He squeezed off rounds one after the other in quick succession without even a moment to focus on aiming.
“There it is!” she cried, slipping her hand down between the seats. “I must have…” Jenna trailed off as she jammed her fingers down and tried to get it. “C’mon, you bastard.”
All around them burners attacked relentlessly.
Just as Jenna pulled it out, one reached in and yanked her out of her seat.
“Jenna!”
Even as Miles exited the passenger side and fired into the face of a burner trying to make his way over, he could see two more attacking her, dragging her across the lot, drawing her away as she screamed. The phone fell out of her hand and as hard as he tried to get to her, he couldn’t.
Within seconds she disappeared beneath their boots, trampled, stomped and gone.
In a fit of fury, Miles unloaded every bullet in his handgun. He wasn’t thinking about that phone, all that went through his mind was her. The look of sheer terror on her face as they brutalized her and stole her from him. “No!”
Even as he reached the end of what was in the magazine, he pressed forward, fists, legs, using his body as a weapon. Hal and Grady pulled him back. Had it not been for the others covering them, they would have died in the very school lot they grew up in.
He was hauled into the back of the Humvee, and Molly took over driving.
“Did anyone get the phone?”
“I got it,” Vanessa said, holding it up.
The sound of bodies colliding with the Humvee was sickening but not nearly as sickening as the final image of Jenna being trampled. In those moments after, Miles remembered the sound of the tires biting into dust, the yelling of those inside and a few more gunshots, but the rest was a blur, nothing more than a cacophony of chaos.
He didn’t even register them stopping far outside the town limits, but he heard them, outside, talking among themselves.
“Can’t you access it?”
“I want to know.”
“He should have told us.”
“Do you think he’ll be okay?”
“I can’t believe Jenna’s gone.”
It continued for an unknown amount of time until Miles exited the vehicle. As soon as he emerged, all eyes were on him. No one said a word. “Where’s the phone?”
“Miles. We don’t need to do this now.”
“The phone.”
“He’s right. Miles, we can—.”
“Give me the phone!” he cried out before his voice went soft. “Please.”
Vanessa handed it over and he looked at it. He wanted so badly to stomp on it, or throw it away. If he hadn’t gone back there, she’d still be alive. Tears welled in Miles’ eyes as he slid his finger across the screen to unlock. Once it was open he noted that it was getting a signal. He accessed his video messages and there it was — the message from Dr. Donnie Marco, his friend, his colleague, his lab partner.
With a quick flick of the thumb, Miles turned on the video.
Twenty-One - Baltimore
The video image of Donnie Marco appeared on the screen. A closeup of his narrowed bright blue eyes behind spectacles came in at an angle until he adjusted the camera and then stepped back. He took a seat on the edge of a bed, wiped sweat from his forehead and then glanced at his wristwatch. He was wearing dark pants, a pinstripe white shirt and a blue tie. His wavy gray hair looked unkempt as if he hadn’t cut it in over a year. He certainly looked far different than the spotless individual Miles remembered. Although they’d spoken by phone a few weeks prior to the FBI’s raid, Miles hadn’t seen him in years. Still, their lengthy discussions and research together at Johns Hopkins were still fresh in his mind.
“Hello, old friend.” Donnie offered a strained smile. “I’m sorry I never made it to your talk.” He nodded slowly. “I really wanted to be there.” A pause. “So… Insect Allies. I knew one day DARPA would push the envelope on what was possible, I just never imagined how closely our work would overlap.” Miles frowned. What did he mean by overlap? “I trust that it went well and as always you wowed the crowd.” He took a deep breath as his right knee
bounced nervously. Donnie had always been a very composed man, a deep thinker who pondered conversation before replying. In all the years they’d worked together Miles had never seen him as nervous as he was then. It was like witnessing a different man.
Dark circles under his eyes revealed a lack of sleep, and his nervous twitching made him look afraid. “Where do I begin?” He glanced away. “Like you, when I got involved in medicine, my dream was to revolutionize the world — to come up with new vaccines that lifted humanity out of the mire, and yet in my earnestness to pave the way, I overlooked, rushed and made terrible mistakes. I should have stayed at Johns Hopkins and continued the research we were doing. Instead, I took this position. I regret it now. Do you remember our conversation two weeks ago? I mentioned I was on the verge of making a breakthrough on that research we conducted back in ’97.” He asked in a way as if Miles would reply. “Well, I did it, Miles. It worked. I came up with a way to prevent Lyme disease.” The painful expression on his face didn’t speak well of someone who had found a cure for the fastest-growing vector-borne infection in the United States.
Lyme disease had been for the longest time at the center of their conversations. Miles recalled the many nights drinking brandy and smoking cigars as they talked about how it came to be. They discussed history, and the rumors about the germ facility of Plum Island and its connection to the emergence of Lyme disease, which occurred only a few miles off its shore. Donnie would go into great detail on the numerous biological open-air experiments conducted by the government from 1949 to 1969. Although at times the conversations bordered upon fantastical, they were often nothing more than speculation fueled by too much alcohol. But it did spark a joint effort to find a vaccine.
By the time they began research, others were already ahead of the curve. One company in particular had managed to get licensed in the late ’90s to release medicine for those with Lyme disease. Although initially achieving high success, it was quickly pulled from the market as lawsuits followed claiming apparent side effects.
One company’s demise was another’s opportunity.
They had both followed the developments with fascination and curiosity and after that vaccine was pulled from the market, they began to envision a better way — not just a cure for humans but a solution that would wipe out Lyme disease for good. That research took them down numerous avenues and they were close to breaking through when Donnie got the job offer that took him to the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
On the screen, Donnie blew out his cheeks with a look of frustration. “It worked, Miles. The fungus was the key. I wish you could have been there to see it.” He shook his head again and glanced at his watch. “Another year and we might have been able to roll out something. Then, last July when Congress passed that amendment for the DoD to conduct an investigation into whether the Pentagon experimented with ticks and other insects — you know, for the spread of diseases in biological weapons and whether or not they were released accidentally or intentionally.” He exhaled hard. “Well, that spotlight must have ruffled a few feathers because that’s when they shifted gears and wanted to head in a new direction. At least that’s what they made me believe.” He smiled. “Lo and behold a few weeks after the amendment was pushed through, our lab was shut down by the CDC.” He brought up his fingers and created quote signs in the air. “Violations over safety concerns. All legitimate — at least that’s what we were told. After the shutdown, things changed at Fort Detrick. We continued working but not with certain agents. We were struggling to meet deadlines.”
Donnie sighed and ran a hand over his head.
Miles hit pause and looked at Wayne who was breathing over his shoulder. “Do you mind?”
Wayne’s eyebrows shot up. “What? I was just… ugh, go ahead, I’ll get the Cliff Notes later.” He walked off to smoke a cigarette. Miles looked at Hal and Molly who urged him to continue.
He tapped the screen and the video played on.
“After the CDC got involved, many of the programs were put on the back burner, some were shut down entirely. I felt under pressure to complete my research. I tried to tell them that I needed more time. I told them that we couldn’t aerosolize the spores and spread until we did further testing as there was no way to know how humans would react if they came in contact with it. My testing, Miles, was only in ticks and other insects, not in humans. They wouldn’t listen. Now I’m starting to wonder if they wanted me to make this to harm humans instead of ticks. The whole timing of the lab’s shutdown seemed so convenient.” He shook his head. “A shutdown certainly makes it a lot easier to justify canceling programs, and handing them off to other labs so no one person would know the full extent of a program.” He brought a hand up to his face and looked as if he was about to cry. “I should have known. I mean, why get rid of ticks?” He brought his fingers up and rubbed them. “Money, Miles. The global market for a vaccine against Lyme disease is roughly $1 billion every year — that’s the cost for treating patients with acute and chronic Lyme disease. They don’t want that to go away. Like handing out expensive bandages, they would rather profit from the continued misery of others than stamp it out for good.” He lowered his head. “No, they had ulterior motives. They said they wanted a method to get rid of the ticks entirely and that’s what we were working toward before they hired me. With enough time we wouldn’t have needed a vaccine as there would be no ticks left to spread disease to humans.”
He ran a hand over his face again. “Anyway, they made promises. They told me that my research would continue but for now they were sending the samples to other labs. They wanted me to focus on another project. That was all smoke and mirrors. Miles, some of those spores were still active when they left here. I don’t know how. They were meant to be inactive so they would be harmless. They were intended for study only.”
Donnie squeezed the bridge of his nose. He looked at his watch again. “Someone labeled the spores inactive and sent them to eighteen labs in nine states as well as overseas.” He began reeling off where they’d gone. “Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, California, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin, London, Paris and Hong Kong. Miles, those labs had lower biosafety levels, they weren’t equipped to handle live spores. At some point they aerosolized them, making them easier to breathe in. The workers had no clue. It was London who realized and alerted the CDC but by then it was too late. Workers had been exposed to the spores, and some had been used in an insect test near Dugway Proving Ground.”
Miles stared at the video with a look of horror.
Burning Man.
The insects.
Operation Big Itch all over again.
That woman from the media was right.
“You remember that anthrax screwup back in 2015? It’s that, all over again, and now they are trying to pin this on me. Blaming me for incorrect labeling when I wasn’t even involved in the shipment. Now the feds want to arrest me for some form of biological espionage because of ties to China.”
Miles knew about his frequent visits to China, his talks in universities and his assistance in biological research, but it was all above board, approved and long before he got involved with the lab at Detrick. “They set me up, Miles; hired me, had me work on this project to get it to this point and then pulled the rug out.” He paused, staring into the camera in shock. “I can’t prove that incorrect labeling wasn’t intentional, or that they purposely didn’t deactivate some of the spores, but none of that matters now. I fear they used my research to create a new bioweapon. Listen, before they removed me and Dr. Harold Davis, I transferred all the research onto a USB flash drive and placed it in a secure location. I would have sent it to you so you could get the truth out but they’ve been watching me. I think they’ve tapped my lines.” Donnie pawed at his eyes and sighed. “I wish I could help but they will see to it that I never see the light of day. If anyone can turn this around it’s you. You are the only pers
on I trust. So my friend, it’s down to you now — I will leave this with you — go back to the start, to that summer’s day in ’97, to the brandy and the cigars and beyond the stone, beyond the glass, beyond the wood, there you will find the answers you seek.” Miles’ brow furrowed at the cryptic message before Donnie continued. “Besides the news reports, I have no idea how this will adapt or mutate, and I won’t spend the rest of my life in jail. Don’t trust the military, Miles. Whatever they say, it’s a lie. I just wanted you to know that I never meant to harm anyone. Please let that be known. I’m sorry, Miles.”
Donnie lifted his arm to reveal a handgun.
“No. No. NO!” Miles cried out as if he could hear him but it was just a recording.
Donnie jammed the barrel into his mouth and without hesitation squeezed the trigger.
The gunshot echoed, and his head disappeared in a mist of red before his body slumped to one side. Miles staggered back, hitting the stop button, unable to grasp what he’d heard let alone witnessed.
“Miles.” Molly touched his shoulder but he shrugged her hand off.
His whole world was spinning.
Turning, twisting, a jumbled and overwhelming flood attacking his senses.
Around him the others reacted in their own way.
“What does that mean?” Paige asked. “What did that mean?” she asked again louder but no one could give her an answer as they were in shock.
Miles placed a hand on the back of the Humvee and his gag reflex kicked in. Vomit spewed from his mouth, and he gagged at the vivid image of Donnie’s life ending.
“I don’t understand, what does it mean?” Paige asked again.
Nate lifted a hand and ran it over his head. “It means we are screwed.”
Miles wiped stomach acid from his lips and straightened up. He stumbled around to the driver’s side. He gripped the wheel and stared ahead as the sun dipped beyond the horizon in a wash of orange and red. Abe stopped him from closing the door. “Where are you going?”
“Baltimore, Maryland.”
