by Greig Beck
Maria Vargis looked much more in control. She raised her eyebrows behind her goggles and nodded towards the door. Get on with it, the motion implied.
Casey Franks went to enter first, but Aimee stopped her. ‘Sorry, you can’t go in without some form of bio-protection.’
The HAWC looked at Aimee’s clothing and pulled a disbelieving face. She drew some wrap-around sunglasses from a pocket and put them on. ‘Happier?’
‘No. I mean it, Franks; you’re not coming in.’
Aimee stared hard into the brawny woman’s face; she could tell Franks was thinking it over. Her job was to guard the medical team, but Aimee knew her brief didn’t extend to fighting with them over an area that wasn’t within her expertise. After another few seconds, Franks reached into her left sidearm holster and pulled out a handgun. She spun it in her hand and handed it butt first to Aimee.
Aimee took the gun without hesitation, checked the slide and number of rounds expertly, then sighted along the short black barrel. When she was done, she stuck the gun in her waistband.
Franks nodded with approval. ‘Pretty cool, Doc.’
‘Thanks. We won’t be long.’ Aimee turned back to the door, feeling strangely more secure now she was armed.
‘Okay, but first sound I’m coming in — germs or no germs.’ Franks noticed Michael watching and winked at him. ‘Hey, anyone ever tell you you look kinda cute when you’re terrified?’
Aimee took a breath through her nose and pushed aside the plastic sheet to get to the door. She wished she had a proper bio-mask filter like Michael and Maria — it was always the smell that first revolted her. With the doors and windows sealed tight, there were few places for the gases to escape, and the odour particles created an airborne soup that mixed blood, faeces and stomach gases with a strange oily, toasted scent that defied biological classification.
As Aimee felt the rank humidity on her skin, she worried again about whether the microbe was able to become airborne. She decided to get the task over with as quickly as possible and moved to the first bed.
‘This man was admitted just over twenty hours ago,’ she told the scientists.
She pulled back the discoloured plastic curtain that surrounded the bed. There was no body left to see. The sheets were stained dark red, black and grey, and the floorboards below looked as though several buckets of ink had cascaded over them. The blurred outline of a torso on the sheets was the only proof that a human had once lain there. Our own personal Shroud of Turin, Aimee thought as she held her breath.
There was nothing to examine, nothing to sample. She let the plastic drop. The next three beds were the same.
At the final bed, she hesitated before pulling back the thick plastic. ‘This man came to us just twelve hours ago.’
Aimee kept her eyes on Maria and Michael instead of looking at the bed; she had seen the horrific sight too many times already. The Vargises’ eyes widened behind their laboratory goggles. Aimee could see the reflection of the remains of the man on the cot in Maria’s protective lenses. His arms were gone. His legs were stovepipe-shaped stains leading to a dark jellied substance that oozed from his steaming chest cavity.
Maria blinked twice behind her glasses. The second time, she kept her eyes closed for several seconds.
As the junior attending scientist, it was Michael’s job to collect the samples. His shaking hands came up holding a glass vial and a small spatula. But that was as far as he got. Aimee could see he was having trouble convincing his legs to propel him forward. He rocked slightly and Maria put her hand up to stop him.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said.
She took the implements from Michael, squeezed his wrist briefly, and stepped towards the mess on the bed. Slipping into professional scientist mode, she began to talk through her actions as though conducting an autopsy. She was breathing hard as she spoke and Aimee could tell the process was her way of coping with the situation.
‘Subject appears to be in final stages of total bacterial disintegration. Flesh, blood, osseous material, all physical substance seems to be…’ Her voice trailed off as she moved up the bed towards the man’s head. His entire face was blackened and glistening as the skin and skull beneath dissolved. Maria shook her head slightly before going on. ‘Simply amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this, anywhere in the world.’ She prodded the man’s cheek with the spatula, and looked down at the liquefying flesh below the chest. ‘I’m unable to determine if the biological degradation is the result of some type of protoplasmic conversion or is simply an excreted waste product — the end result of a digestion process.’
As she prodded the man’s face again, a glob of black jelly plopped onto the sheet from the top of the chest cavity. A few drops of the black fluid splashed into the air but didn’t land on Maria. Nevertheless, Aimee saw her freeze and draw in a sharp breath. Bio-hazard suit or not, no one wanted anything this dangerous touching them.
Maria took a scraping from the man’s cheek, coaxed it into the small vial, then sealed it tightly. She did the same with the gelatinous mound at his chest cavity, and finally took a smear of the black liquid that was dripping from the bed to leak between the cracks in the floor.
She carried the three vials to Michael, who was ready with a small silver suitcase. The hiss it made when he opened it told Aimee that it was a hermetically sealed portable unit for chembio sample containment. The lid hissed again when he shut it.
‘We should be working on this agent in a level-4 bio-hazard laboratory,’ Maria said, checking her gloves and her arms for any residue. When she’d finished, she looked across at Aimee in her dirty clothing and simple cotton mask. ‘Well, at least you’ve got a gun, darling.’
Aimee smiled tightly behind her mask.
Maria took a last look around the small cabin then back to Aimee. ‘Okay, Dr Weir, I think we’ve got all the information we can gather. Any further exposure now is just inviting more risk. This isolation room needs to be sterilised.’
Aimee nodded; she’d been thinking the same thing. Time for another bonfire.
* * *
The contents of the isolation hut had shaken the three scientists. But if they had looked below the hut, what they would have seen would have frozen them in disbelief and horror.
Long, black, greasy-looking stalactites hung from the underside of the cabin’s floor, dripping into the pools that hadn’t yet dried out into the dark red mud. At first, the drops sank to the bottom of the shallow puddles. Then, as if heeding some inner call, they began to roll along the bottom of the pools and coalesce together.
As the dark mass grew, it also started to move, straining and stretching towards the life it could sense above. It sank back into its small liquid world; not large enough or strong enough yet.
Where the other huts had stood, small black stains on the mud below the charred ground attested to the matter’s previous attempts to free itself from its prison. These dried residues lay trapped among the fine silt.
Trapped, but only temporarily.
TWENTY
‘I’m not ready to come home yet, General.’
Adira could hear the old man’s rasping breath and the scrunch of leather as he shifted in his favourite chair. She could picture him as clearly as if she was sitting across from him in his office over 5000 miles away. General Meir Shavit, the head of Metsada, Mossad’s Special Operations Division, and her uncle, was not a man to be easily swayed by speculation or sentiment. The old man’s spirit was fire-hardened by war, grief and the witnessing of many atrocities. He could be stubborn, uncompromising and quick to anger — all traits she too possessed. But Adira had an advantage — she was his favourite niece.
She could imagine his expression — countenance creased in an amused smile, one eye slightly squinting as smoke curled up beside his face from his cigarette — as he listened to her argument.
‘Your friend Jack Hammerson keeps me in training even though I have more skills than the frontline HAWCs,’ she said. ‘And I ca
n’t get near the son of a bitch to complain. He only talks to Captain Hunter.’ Her hand tightened on the comm unit as she thought of Alex Hunter out there in a hotzone. ‘And now Hunter’s taken a team over to South America … I should be there with them. And I would be if not for that Hammerson.’
Her uncle gave a slow, dry chuckle. ‘He’s on to you, Addy — maybe from the very first day. “That Hammerson” is no fool.’
She ground her teeth. ‘Maybe, maybe not — he is not as clever as you think, Uncle. But I’m close, I know it. Their Deep Storage facility is buried many levels below the base. I can’t get to it yet, but Hammerson or Hunter are my keys. I just need more time.’
There was a long pause, and Adira heard the general sip something before he spoke again. ‘This man Hunter, his name comes up a lot when we start to talk about the Arcadian, hmm?’
Ach, stupid slip, and he misses nothing, Adira thought. She had avoided revealing that Alex Hunter was the soldier with the extraordinary skills that General Shavit had sent her to find out more about. If he discovered her subterfuge, uncle or not, he’d send other agents who may not be as careful in their information-collection procedures. Adira’s aim was to find out as much as she could about the underlying genesis of Alex Hunter’s skills and capabilities — after all, why deliver up a single man when she could deliver the means to make a thousand of them? She cursed silently; so far, however, she knew very little. It was if Hammerson was anticipating her moves, and keeping her close so he could watch her.
That said, she felt she still had a few cards to play.
‘Information is the greatest weapon we can possess, Uncle. Information on the Arcadian Project is invaluable to Israel. I just need more time, and then it will all be yours.’
‘Hmm, anyone else and I would be suspicious of their motives, Captain Senesh, and perhaps their … manipulations.’ She heard him sip again. ‘You can have your extra time, but bring me something soon … or I’ll send you something, Addy.’
The line went dead, and Adira pulled the small PDA comm away from her head. She tapped her chin with it for a few moments, musing for the hundredth time on how she might either get into the deep facility or get Hammerson to talk, or perhaps even ask Alex Hunter to tell her about the Arcadian blueprint.
If she had been sent on the mission to South America and been able to spend time alone with the man, she might have found out what she needed. There was a connection between them; they were friends. He may even have told her about it voluntarily.
She slid the back off the PDA, pulled the small chip free and replaced it with its standard HAWC chip. She put the removed chip between her back teeth and bit down hard, crushing it, then spat out the fragments.
As she headed back to the barracks, her mind was still working furiously. Being inside the tent wasn’t working; maybe it was time to try going outside. She cursed Jack Hammerson again — he was her greatest roadblock to success.
Two of the recent HAWC recruits fell in behind her and started making comments. The term Jewish princess floated in the air, spoken deliberately for her to hear. Her fists balled. You do not want to piss me off today, she thought.
The men trailed her into the barracks. Adira pushed open the doors into the large, relatively empty rec room. The catcalls from behind became louder as she went to the centre of the floor, rolling her shoulders and flexing her hands, still keeping her back to the men.
Normally, she would have ignored them — they were insignificant, little more than a distraction to her mission plan. But her anger was already at boiling point following her conversation with the general and the knowledge that she had limited time to achieve her aim. Alex Hunter, her reason for joining the unit was being kept from her; the information she needed on the Arcadian Project was out of reach; and Jack Hammerson was holding her in an operational suspended animation. And now she had to deal with a pair of silly children who might have distinguished themselves as SEALs or Rangers, but would probably last an hour in the deserts of Southern Lebanon, and less in a Gaza spiderhole.
She heard them getting closer, their footfalls loud and clumsy. How could these fools ever work with Alex Hunter? They aren’t worthy of him.
A hand alighted on her shoulder.
When she turned, she didn’t see two young men; she saw Jack Hammerson laughing at her. Her anger boiled over and she acted.
* * *
When Zac Ingram regained consciousness, he tried to move but couldn’t. Vision slowly clearing, he realised he was looking through one eye only. His face, chest and groin all hurt. In fact, there were few parts of his body that didn’t.
Slowly turning his head to the left, he could hear the metronomic hiss and pump of a respirator. Denny Wilson was in the bed next to him, purple-bruised eyes taped shut, a breathing tube taped into his mouth. Both arms were in casts and he seemed to be missing a chunk of skin from his forehead.
Zac groaned and looked up at the hospital ceiling. Slowly, a picture drifted into his mind.
The Jewish woman turning — the ferocity on her face — the speed with which she moved. She had knocked them both down, then allowed them up — just to knock them down again.
He moaned as a wave of pain rippled across his bruised diaphragm. ‘Who the fuck is she?’ His voice sounded funny as he spoke the words aloud, and he realised all his front teeth were missing.
TWENTY-ONE
The scientists made their way to the makeshift laboratory that had been set up in Francisco’s old hut. Aimee pulled the gun from her waistband and handed it back, butt first, to Casey Franks.
Franks shook her head. ‘Keep it.’ She pointed her thumb over her shoulder back towards the isolation hut. ‘Bad in there?’
‘Thanks,’ Aimee said, tucking the pistol back into her pants. She looked at the tough woman, wondering what she should tell her. Franks raised her eyebrows in anticipation of an answer.
Fuck it, Aimee thought, we’re all in this together now.
‘Casey, there’s an alpha-terminal micro life form at work here — one that literally breaks down the human physiology. The symptoms are unmistakable — human biological material conversion to a liquefied substance in a matter of hours. We don’t really know what it is, how it spreads, or how to stop it. What we do know is it’s infectious as all hell. So if you see anyone weeping black tears, stay the fuck away from them.’
Casey stopped walking for a second, one side of her face pulling up in a grin. ‘Ooookaay; I’m guessing it’s pretty bad then.’
Maria and Michael had already entered the lab. Aimee paused with her foot on the step. ‘Best if you stay out here, Casey. Don’t want you weeping black tears if anything goes wrong.’
Casey spat out her gum. ‘Not a chance. Didn’t you know? HAWCs don’t cry.’ She winked and followed Aimee into the small room.
The Vargises had already unpacked the samples and set them up in a portable isolation cube: a collapsible perspex square with side-attached gloves, and a lens fitted into the top so either a camera or microscope could be attached. Maria fixed a single large electronic eye onto the top of the cube then fed the cable back to her computer. Michael busied himself with the samples, dripping and scraping specimens onto slides and lining them up so Maria could pass the lens over them.
Aimee moved some of the scientists’ other gear out of the way to make space for herself and Casey. ‘Oof … wow, what’s in here?’ she asked when she tried to lift a metallic suitcase.
‘Leave it,’ Maria said. ‘It’s X-ray material — the lead shielding makes it cumbersome.’
She watched Aimee put the case down before turning her attention back to the microscope.
‘Good to go,’ Michael said, pulling his hands from the cube’s gloves and sitting down in a chair close to his mother.
Maria typed a few commands and the wriggling, spinning life forms jumped into focus. She moved across the different samples, enlarging, clarifying. The forms became more animated the more liquefied the flesh sample
s became.
Maria folded her arms and sat back. ‘Well, your little Hidden Key is bacterial all right, and it’s big, perhaps one to one-point-five micrometres. I’m guessing peptidoglycan bacterial walls given the cross-linked polysaccharides. Michael, take a look — see the protective rigid S-layer covering the outside of the cell? Going to be a tough little bastard with all that organic armour plating.’
She increased the magnification slightly on a section of one of the microorganisms and shook her head. ‘You know, just when I think I know what I’m looking at, I see something else that makes me think this thing doesn’t belong here at all.’
Aimee frowned. ‘You mean, on the surface?’
Maria shrugged. ‘No. I mean anywhere.’ She pointed at the screen. ‘Look, a single flagellum gives it mobility, but only when in suspension … And there, another smaller one; rigid — not sure what that’s for — could it act as a potential virulence factor?’
She sat back again and Aimee crouched down to look at the computer screen. ‘Well, it’s big enough that we can trap it,’ she said. ‘Filter it out maybe?’
Maria and Michael talked together in rapid Greek, completely ignoring Aimee for a few moments. At last, as if suddenly remembering the question, Michael said over his shoulder, ‘You’re right; it’s enormous — way too big to pass through skin. It’d need to enter via the respiratory system, the eye or any other orifice, or perhaps an open wound. A vector could probably inoculate it directly into the body — and round here there’s no shortage of biting insects. But the stiffened filament … strange … it’s too highly developed to be a superfluous vestige.’
Aimee crossed her arms. ‘Maybe direct epidermal introduction …?’
‘Hmm, interesting … You’re thinking maybe that rigid filament is some sort of delivery mechanism — like a genetic injector? Could be used for some type of nucleic material transmission … acting like a virus? No, no, no, that’s impossible for a bacterium.’
