The soldiers ahead of him moved stealthily through the jungle: ducking under vines, passing through curtains of epiphyte and orchid roots, and skirting clusters of shrubs easily as tall as they were. Byrne frequently lost sight of them, only to watch them materialize from some unexpected point in the brush. He tried his best to minimize the ruckus of his passage, for all the good it did him. At least the others wouldn’t be able to lose him.
Byrne’s introduction to them had been brief and he’d been so preoccupied he’d glossed over them. He’d spent the entire plane ride from Atlanta to Morón Air Base in Spain poring over satellite imagery. The preliminary aerial surveillance wasn’t as cut-and-dried as he’d initially believed.
Daru was a small settlement twenty miles southeast of the diamond-mining town of Tongo. It had a population of 6,000, the majority of whom were of the Mende ethnic group. It also housed barracks for the Sierra Leonean army, which made it a target of moderate strategic value, especially to an extremist faction like Boko Haram.
The militant Islamic jihadist group had swept across Cameroon, Chad, and Niger like a fiery plague, slaughtering and burning everyone and everything in its path. After pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, it became the de facto western army of ISIS, poised to roll eastward across Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, where the two forces would converge with the entirety of Northern Africa and the Middle East under their direct control, providing the ideal staging grounds to launch a massive assault upon Europe.
The simple fact was the correlation between the dead monkeys and the bodies in the streets of Daru was speculative at best. True, the timeframe lent more credibility to Byrne’s hypothesis than mere coincidence, but even he could see how similar the satellite images looked to those of the towns hundreds of miles to the east left smoldering in Boko Haram’s wake. He’d compared them for any overt dissimilarities, anything he could use to rule out a militaristic siege, but couldn’t find anything incontrovertible. By the time he’d set aside the images, he was beginning to think maybe he’d been dispatched into a warzone rather than ground zero of a viral outbreak, which was why he regretted not making more of an effort to connect with the soldiers stealing through the shadows ahead of him.
He’d assumed they were part of the cargo plane’s crew clear up until the point they were twenty thousand feet above Sierra Leone and briefing him so fast he could barely keep up with what they were saying.
Theirs was a mission of reconnaissance, to establish the nature and severity of the threat. If they determined that they were dealing with a potential spillover event, then they were to create a firm perimeter and contain the situation until a team of CDC and UN scientists assembling in Nuremburg could be deployed. If they were instead faced with hostile opposition, they were to gather as much intel as they could while doing everything in their power to keep themselves alive.
Captain Trevor Richards remained in the lead and only occasionally dropped back far enough for Byrne to see him. The digital camouflage of his isolation suit made him nearly invisible and indistinguishable from the other men, were it not for the way he moved. He was sinewy and lithe, fluid in his movements, unlike First Lieutenant Chad Graves, whose broad shoulders and loping gait made him appear to move like a silverback through the brush. Private First Class Ryan Anthony remained closest to Byrne and served as his personal protector, quite obviously against his will. When his assignment had been handed down, the kid had looked like he was going to throw a tantrum. To his credit, he’d steeled his broad jaw, thrown out his chest, and saluted his commanding officer before turning his gray eyes upon Byrne and offering a curt nod. Corporal Elias Warren brought up the rear. He was easily a half-foot shorter than the rest of them and built more like a wide receiver than a linebacker, but he had an economy of movement that somehow lent him an air of danger, as though he were the personification of a trap perpetually prepared to spring.
In the grand scheme of things, Byrne supposed it didn’t matter in the slightest whether they liked or respected him as long as they did their jobs and kept him alive. Of course, when it came right down to it, that was undoubtedly how they must have viewed him, too.
The forest thinned, if only by degree. By the time he recognized the clearing through the trees, they were already upon it.
Richards lay on his stomach in the overgrowth beneath a cieba tree, scanning the clearing through the scope of his M27 IAR.
Anthony appeared as if by magic beside Byrne and pulled him to his knees.
Graves crouched beside them, staring down the slope of tall, wavering grasses toward where a town squatted in the darkness. The buildings were mere silhouettes, nearly indistinguishable from the night.
“Jesus,” Richards whispered.
Warren slid into the bushes beside Richards and sighted down his rifle.
“Someone must have come back for them,” he whispered. “Either that or our intel’s flawed.”
“What do you see?” Byrne asked.
“The bodies,” Richards whispered. “They’re gone.”
* * *
6:03 a.m. GMT
They walked in a diamond formation down the main road into Daru. The rising sun cast their shadows ahead of them. Anthony and Warren had scouted ahead and determined there wasn’t a single living organism within the settlement, which didn’t make any of them feel the slightest bit better about the situation. Richards took point and swept his rifle from one side of the deserted street to the other. Anthony and Warren stayed to either side of Byrne, covering the open doorways and windows of the two-story shacks, while Graves brought up the rear.
It reminded Byrne of the ghost towns of the American West, only rather than an air of mystery, an almost palpable shroud of suffering was draped over it.
Richards stopped and waved him forward. There was a dried spatter of blood on the dirt beside scuffmarks where it looked like a body had been dragged from the road.
“Do what you need to do,” Richards said. He removed his backpack, unzipped the main pouch, and extricated the case containing Byrne’s equipment, which he dropped unceremoniously to the ground. “And do it fast.”
Byrne knelt and opened his case. Inside were all of the tools he needed for the collection and testing of blood in the field. Ideally, samples would be taken directly from the source, but he had the skill to make this work. The blood was clotted and congealed with the dirt which, fortunately, was packed and hadn’t allowed the blood to soak very deep. He chiseled off the uppermost layer and scooped it into a plastic baggie.
“I need somewhere to set up.”
Richards locked eyes with Anthony and jerked his head toward the nearest storefront.
Anthony nodded and approached it in a shooter’s stance with his rifle seated against his shoulder. The front doors were little more than shutters that folded back to open the entire width of a shop, above which a hand-painted sign that read simply: 190 Kissy St. He broke the padlock with the butt of his rifle, fished it from the latch, and tossed it aside. Graves covered Anthony while the soldier cautiously drew the shutters open. Graves vanished into the darkness for nearly a full minute before emerging with his barrel lowered.
“All clear.”
Byrne glanced back to find Richards staring at him.
“What are you waiting for?”
Byrne closed the sample inside the case and headed toward the store. There were three rows of metal shelves, all stuffed to overflowing with a seemingly random assortment of goods. Vegetables rotted in wicker baskets beside open sacks of grain. Warm bottles of Coca-Cola were packed next to unlabeled bottles filled with liquids of various colors that looked homemade.
Anthony used his arm to clear some space, sending the wares crashing to the floor.
Byrne set his case on the shelf and carefully unloaded his supplies. The first thing he needed to do was separate the blood from the dirt by spinning it down in a centrifuge with an anticoagulant so he could run it through a gamut of tests and assays. He’d
done this so many times he could do it in his sleep. His hands performed tasks he’d learned by rote while his mind tried to rationalize his situation.
He’d expected to find the bodies rotting in the streets. He couldn’t think of a single explanation for how such a large number could vanish in less than twenty-four hours. There were obvious marks indicating they’d been dragged away, but to where and for what reason? Scavengers picked at the remains where they lay. Predators moved their meals to a place where they could be consumed uninterrupted, but only did so with fresh kills, certainly not corpses potentially festering with disease.
The portable centrifuge whirred to a stop. He separated the blood from the heavier organic material and transferred it into several smaller wells. He drew up the blood from the first well and ran it through a First Antigen Rapid Test to evaluate for hemorrhagic diseases like Ebola while he set up the ELISA assay and the PCR machine. The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay measured the concentration of antibodies and evaluated for a wide variety of viral, bacterial, protozoan, and helminthic infections from Dengue fever and leprosy to malaria and Chagas disease. The polymerase chain reaction would allow him to isolate and identify any viral DNA from the human genome by running it alongside one of his control samples.
“What’s taking so long?” Richards asked.
“These tests take time,” Byrne said.
“Time’s a luxury we can’t afford, Doc,” Anthony said.
Byrne tuned them out. He loaded the genomic, viral, and plasmid templates into the wells in the Palm PCR instrument beside the blood sample and set it aside to work its magic. He placed the final blood sample onto a Polystyrene plate coated with an antibody solution, added an enzyme-conjugated antibody, and finally the substrate that would trigger the reaction and produce a measurable signal. He slid it to one side and used a pipette to transfer the PCR samples to the gel electrophoresis machine, which conducted an electrical charge across an agar medium to separate the prepared DNA segments by size, isolating the viral segment from the human and control samples.
He breathed an audible sigh of relief when the First Antigen Rapid Test came back negative.
“We can rule out hemorrhagic fever,” Byrne said.
“So we can take off these infernal suits?” Warren said. He stood with his back to them, sighting the opposite side of the street through his scope.
“Not yet. There are still hundreds of diseases we need to cross off our list, any one of which could kill us in any number of painful and horrific ways.”
Byrne removed the gelatinous medium from the electrophoresis machine and shined a black light onto it.
Anthony must have read the expression of surprise on his face.
“What is it?”
“There’s no virus.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. There’s no virus.”
“Could it have separated from the blood or could the sample have been contaminated?” Richards asked.
“You don’t understand. A virus works by inserting its DNA directly into the host’s genetic code. That’s its sole biological imperative. It infects the individual cells and uses the host’s RNA to replicate its own DNA. In essence, its genes are incorporated into those of the organism it infects, like adding more teeth to a zipper. The human genome contains the residue of countless historical viruses we’ve been passing down for eons. This blood perfectly matches that of the control sample.”
“Then what the hell killed all of these people?” Richards asked from directly behind him.
Byrne attached the ELISA plate reader to his laptop and launched the software. The application generated a curve that plotted fluorescence against the concentration of interferons, which were signaling proteins released by cells in response to the presence of viruses, bacteria, and parasites. The comparison to the saved control sample excluded Interferon Type I and III reactions, which were produced in response to an aggressive virus. The elevated levels of Interferon Type II indicated an acute immune response, despite the complete absence of any identifiable pathogen. The presence of immunoglobin G and E antibodies further muddied the waters. They were only produced by the immune system in response to specific infections.
And then it hit him.
“That can’t be right,” Byrne said.
“Talk to me,” Richards said.
“The levels of immunoglobins G and E are off the charts.”
“What does that mean?”
“IgG attaches to pathogens designated for elimination and IgE binds to allergens that produce histamine and cause inflammation. The two in conjunction indicate a very specific immune response, one designed to combat the presence of a toxin capable of triggering a violent allergic reaction.”
“In English, Doctor.”
“The human immune system releases these antibodies in response to the presence of biological toxins, like those found in a bee sting or a snake bite, only in nowhere near these concentrations.”
“You’re suggesting—”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m telling you that I know without a doubt what killed these people.”
“And what’s that?”
“Venom.”
* * *
8:36 am GMT
The building across the street featured a native clothing store and, above it, a two-room apartment, the rear window of which offered an unobstructed view of the grassy slope leading uphill through the pastures to the edge of the forest. From this vantage point, they could clearly see the trampled paths where the bodies had been dragged from the streets. They converged into a single trail that led beneath the dense canopy. In the far distance to the west, Byrne could see the broken fence where the long-horned cattle from the satellite image had once been contained.
The occupants of the apartment had been overcome while they slept. The bed linens lay crumpled to one side and the sheets were spattered with blood, although the combined volume couldn’t have been more than three or four ounces, even taking into account the spatters on the walls and the smears leading across the floor, down the wooden stairs, and through the doors and windows. Whoever claimed their remains had been careful not to leave any traces of their presence. It was as though the attack had come in two phases. The initial siege had been fast and surgical in its precision: the victims had been injected with venom and left to succumb to the eventual paralysis. The second had come some time later, when the bodies could be collected without offering the slightest resistance. That was their working theory, anyway. Unspoken between them was the fact that if their theory was correct, there was the chance the victims could still be alive.
“We should call it in,” Byrne said.
“And say what?” Richards said. “All we have is a single blood test from an unknown victim who, for all we know, could have been stung by a bee before their death.”
“So what do you propose then?”
“We search the remainder of the town. Whoever did this must have left some trace behind. You continue running your tests. If that fails, I can think of one sure way to conclusively determine what we’re up against.”
Byrne stared at the point where the path vanished into the darkness beneath the branches. He recalled his observation that the entire town could have been surrounded without anyone knowing it and had to stifle a shiver.
“What’s over there?” Warren asked from where he knelt by the adjacent window, studying the forest through the scope of his rifle.
“The satellite imagery shows a seamless stretch of forest,” Graves said.
“What about thermal or magnetometric imagery?”
“We didn’t anticipate needing them. We’ll have to wait for the satellite to pass over again.”
“And when’s that?”
“Just under twelve hours from now,” Graves said.
“You’re kidding, right? We should be able to task any satellite and have it here within ninety minutes,” Warren said.
“If you want t
he same aerial photographs we already have, sure. If you want to see anything below the canopy, we have to coordinate with NASA to get the GEOS 2 satellite overhead. It’s in geosynchronous orbit, so it can only be programmed to pass overhead once every twenty-four hours.”
“By then it could be too late. We need to know what’s out there right now!”
“Then we have no choice but to take matters into our own hands,” Richards said. “Doc, I need to know every possible method of venom dispersal.”
“I’m certainly no authority—”
“An educated guess will suffice.”
“I would imagine the primary method of delivery would have to be subdermal. Our skin acts as a barrier, hence the reason bees have stingers and snakes have fangs.”
“No possible means of aerial envenomation?”
“I’ve never heard of it, but that’s not to say it can’t be done. To the best of my knowledge, no one’s attempted the weaponization of venom, outside of its use on darts and arrows by various indigenous tribes.”
“So if we’re wearing our isolation suits, we should be safe,” Anthony said.
“As long as they remain intact,” Byrne said. “Keep in mind, though, they aren’t designed to stand up to any kind of trauma or sharp penetration.”
“I got news for you, Doc,” Graves said. “Anyone gets that close to us will have a bullet through his brain before he can even think about attacking.”
“This town had a population of nearly two thousand. As far as we know, not one of them escaped their collective fate. We should just report in and wait for backup to arrive.”
“And by doing so we could be consigning our reinforcements to their deaths,” Richards said. “We need to determine the nature of the threat before we do anything else.”
Byrne looked toward the forest, where presumably the entire town had been dragged. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what was out there.
* * *
11:48 am GMT
SNAFU: Unnatural Selection Page 29
