It wasn’t enough that a wheat stem rust infection would set into motion a series of events that would slowly lead to economic ruin and starvation, it needed to do so in a fast and predictable manner. The African desert locusts were the swarming variety, the kind that descended as a cloud upon a field and left nothing but inedible stalks in their wake. This particular species could be counted upon to lay siege to the targeted fields, but the problem quickly became one of containment. An aggressive swarm could follow the grain belt west and cut a swath across the Ukraine and Eastern Europe, leaving behind worthless acres infected with wheat rust to such an extent that nothing would grow there for years to come, but if their theory was correct, they’d finally found a solution.
Or at least they thought they had.
Randall stood in the center of the entomology lab, surrounded by six-foot-tall glass aquariums swarming with locusts. All except for one, anyway. The glass was cracked and the lid canted upward ever so slightly. It took him a moment to realize that the damage had been inflicted from the inside, where, unlike the other cages, wheat plants grew largely unmolested. The soil, however, was littered with small bones, feathers, and scavenged bird carcasses.
“What the hell happened here?”
“Show him what you showed me,” Thompson said.
Like all of the civilian scientists, Stephen Waller wore black-rimmed glasses, a white lab coat, and his ID badge clipped to his breast pocket. He was their resident entomologist, a field Randall suspected he’d chosen because of his physical resemblance. He was tall and slender and moved as though he possessed joints where others didn’t.
“If you’ll follow me, Sergeant,” he said, and led the way around the back of the aquarium to the ladder leaning against it. He gestured to it and Randall ascended until he was just above the level of the lid. It was immediately apparent what had happened.
Randall traced his fingertips across the raised edge of the lid. The bodies of hundreds of locusts were crammed into the seam, one on top of another, so many that they’d used the sheer mass of dead bodies to raise the lid high enough for the remainder to squeeze out.
“Extraordinary,” Randall whispered.
“More than that, sir. This level of coordination is beyond anything we’ve ever seen. Not even honeybees exhibit such extreme hive-mind behavior. These individuals willingly sacrificed themselves so that the others could escape. That’s higher-level thinking not traditionally associated with so-called lower orders of life.”
Cattail-like spines protruded from the carcasses. They were actually the stalks of a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, an entomopathogenic species from Thailand that infected ants, causing them to climb a specific plant to a predesignated height, bite onto the underside of a leaf, and cling there until the fungus consumed its body and produced an explosion of spores from its fruiting bodies. The locusts had been suitable vectors for the wheat stem rust bacterium, but the unilateralis had only infected one of the twelve groups exposed to it—the one bred for aggressiveness toward avian predators, a flock of which could end their infestation before it began—and even then only a small number had survived to repopulate the swarm.
“We suspect the locusts’ behavior served a similar function to that of the ‘death grip’ of the ants’ mandibles, which the fungus utilizes to immobilize its host while it parasitizes it,” Thompson said. “Or at least that’s our working theory.”
“You’re telling me the fungus made them cram themselves into a tiny crack until there were enough dead bodies to raise the lid?” Randall said.
“That’s how it works, sir,” Waller said. “The spores attach to the exoskeleton, burrow through it using a combination of enzymes and mechanical force, and spread throughout the body in their yeast stage. They then infiltrate the insect’s brain and assume control of its motor functions.”
“A fungus can’t think.”
“It can in the sense that the ant—or, in this case, the locust—is able to. Its sole biological imperative is the perpetuation of its species, which means that it will do everything within its power to achieve its reproductive potential.”
Randall lifted one of the compressed carcasses from the rim. It looked like it had been stomped by a shoe. Several others came away with it, all of them tangled together by a snarl of stalks and some kind of white fuzz.
“What’s this furry stuff?”
“Hyphae. They’re thin filaments that spread throughout the host’s body while the fungus consumes it. They help maintain structural integrity and form a network not unlike our own circulatory or nervous systems.”
Randall remembered the holes in the exoskeletons of the locusts he found in the rabbit cages.
“So where are all of these growths on the ones that escaped?”
“Its rate of proliferation is staggering,” Thompson said through the speaker, which made his voice sound tinny.
Randall leaned right up against the window to get a better view of the rabbit on the dissection tray inside The Warren’s sealed lab. Its front and hind legs had been stretched out and pinned to the black wax. The flesh had been parted straight up its spine, the skin and fur retracted, and the naked musculature exposed. The spinous processes of its vertebrae were elongated by the stalk-like growths protruding from them. The base of its skull had been opened to reveal its brain and cranial nerve bundles.
He pressed the button and spoke into the microphone so his chief scientist could hear him.
“It looks like it’s already infiltrated the central nervous system.”
“We theorize that it entered the circulatory system via the superficial capillaries and crossed the blood-brain barrier in the same manner it breaks through the exoskeleton of an insect,” Thompson said. “There’s a minimal amount of hemorrhaging and midline shift, but the greatest hematological difference appears to be in the total volume of residual blood, which we estimate to be roughly half that of a living specimen.”
“There was no blood on the substrate.”
“Precisely.”
“The fungus is feeding on the blood?”
“More likely incorporating it into its biomass in much the same way other multicellular species of fungi grow from corpses and accelerate the process of decomposition.”
“Then how did they manage to infect the locusts in the first place?”
“Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is incredibly susceptible to infection from other fungi, which is why it doesn’t simply wipe out entire ant species wherever it goes. It’s nature’s way of keeping its reproduction in check. To protect the fungus-host ecosystem, it engages in what’s known as secondary metabolism, a process by which it produces the antibacterial agents necessary to stave off pathogens during the reproductive cycle. That’s why none of the other test batches survived. The antibodies they produced caused the wheat stem rust to produce deoxynivalenol in response to the threat, killing the unilateralis before it could assume command of the host’s motor functions. The locusts that had been bred for their aggressive response to predatory species added an element to the equation in the form of a foreign blood source, a threat against which all three species—fungal and host alike—were forced to work in tandem.”
Thompson used a pair forceps to lift off the crown in the rabbit’s skull, which peeled away from the brain with long strands reminiscent of worms. The fungus had already taken root and was in the process of growing through the cranium.
“It’s metabolizing the blood,” Randall said.
“That’s our working hypothesis,” Thompson said. “It’s consuming some component of the blood to produce the antibodies that allow it to circumvent the immune response and proliferate unchecked within the host’s body.”
“So what’s the end result?”
“Any speculation at this point would be premature.”
“I don’t want speculation, Doctor. I want answers.”
Randall glanced at the rabbit one last time before leaving the lab. He could have sworn the
re were even more filaments protruding from the muscles to either side of its spine than there’d been when he arrived.
“ARE YOU SURE this is what they want?” Corporal Lyle Benjamin asked. “Because there’s no going back from this. We’ve never decommissioned a well of this nature before, largely because such a thing has never existed until now. This is uncharted territory for us. This isn’t a well where we’ve extracted oil and water’s going to take its place. We’ve actively injected massive amounts of chemicals into porous rock where there wasn’t space for them to begin with.”
Randall looked up at the rigging of the derrick, which towered over them like a five-story spike driven into the earth. The chief engineer was right, of course, but he resented having his orders questioned. The instability was the whole reason they were decommissioning the 12,045-foot deep injection well, which had been commissioned for the disposal of waste chemicals from the weapons program and the commercial interests leasing space on the arsenal.
The original plan had been to allow the chemicals to precipitate in open-air, asphalt-lined holding basins the size of small lakes. Unfortunately, they’d contaminated the groundwater to such an extent that farmers dozens of miles away were losing entire harvests. The backup plan of sealing the waste in drums and dumping it into the ocean had proven too costly, necessitating the alternative of burying it so deep that it couldn’t infiltrate the groundwater through the bedrock. The flaw was that the high pressure required to force fluid into a space not designed to accommodate it had triggered a series of earthquakes, a regrettable outcome, to be sure, but nothing catastrophic. At least it wasn’t until the cause of the unprecedented seismic activity made the papers.
Honestly, Randall didn’t care one way or the other. Production was his concern, not disposal, and he had enough on his plate today that he didn’t have the time or the patience to hold the hand of an engineer who’d already received his orders from higher up the chain of command.
“Just get it done,” he said.
“It’s not as easy as plugging a hole. We have no idea how the concrete casings held up to the corrosive effects of the chemicals. We thought three concentric layers was overkill at the time, but we also thought the waste wouldn’t be able to eat through half an inch of asphalt. It’s possible that the pipe itself is the only thing holding the well together and once we remove it, the whole damn thing will collapse.”
“Then leave the pipe.”
“If we do, we risk the pressure building and creating a toxic geyser like Old Faithful.”
“Then take it out. What do you want me to say?”
“Here’s the thing,” Benjamin said. “The bottom seventy feet has no lining whatsoever. We’ve pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals into permeable Precambrian metamorphic rock. Lord only knows what effects they had on it. There could very well be a cavity eroded under half the state and we’re about to destabilize the whole works.”
Randall heard his name shouted from a distance and turned to see Thompson running across the field toward him. The production plants were little more than silhouettes against the plains behind him. He’d never seen the scientist in the sunlight before, let alone moving at a pace anywhere close to a jog. Something must have happened in the lab. Something of a sensitive nature that couldn’t be broadcast across the open airwaves. Time to end this conversation.
“You have your orders, Corporal. Tear the damn thing down.”
Benjamin’s eyes narrowed and his jaw muscles bulged.
“Yes, sir.”
Randall turned his back on the engineer and struck off down the dirt road to meet Thompson. Benjamin immediately started barking orders behind him and the engines of demolition vehicles roared to life.
Thompson stopped a hundred yards away and had to double over to catch his breath. Randall closed the gap and pulled the scientist upright by the back of his lab coat.
“What is it, Doctor?” he asked.
“There are no words to describe it. You have to see it to believe it.”
TODAY
Channel 7, News Update
“WE HAVE BREAKING news to report,” the newscaster says. “For those of you who somehow missed it, seismologists are reporting a magnitude 5.3 earthquake that shook the downtown area. The USGS is holding a press conference in Golden right now, where the chief seismologist, Dr. Rana Ratogue, is talking to reporters. Let’s hear what she has to say.”
The image on the screen cuts to a woman with jet-black hair and blue eyes. Her name is displayed above the words United States Geological Survey and between the station logo and a rushed graphic with concentric circles at the center of the Colorado map.
“...a swarm of earthquakes that have occurred over the last twenty-four hours along the Front Range, about ten miles northeast of Denver, on the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. We’ve tracked more than a dozen in all, most of them nowhere near as strong as the magnitude 5.3 we experienced at 10:58 AM Mountain Time. The thing to note about the sequence is we’ve had swarm activity in this very same region before, although not since the 1960s...”
TODAY
Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, Commerce City, Colorado
RANA TRUDGES THROUGH the hip-deep weeds of one of the nation’s largest urban refuges toward the epicenter’s GPS coordinates. She’s surrounded by willow groves, marshes, and seemingly eternal stretches of grass, and yet she can still see the skyscrapers of downtown Denver from the corner of her eye. The air positively shivers with the roar of planes passing low overhead as they descend into DIA, mere miles to the east. It’s strange to think that this sanctuary filled with bison and ferrets, deer and bald eagles, had not so long ago been a toxic swamp unsuitable for habitation. She knew of its history, which was why she was unsurprised to learn that the coordinates corresponded to the location of the deep injection well that had been the source of the quakes that necessitated its closure in the first place.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the well had been properly sealed in the eighties and the process of remediation was moving along at an unprecedented rate. In fact, they were debating opening the final remaining closed area to the public a full year before the original Superfund timetable. A new swarm of earthquakes was more than a setback; it potentially compromised all of their hard work by creating fissures through which the chemicals trapped below the bedrock could seep into the groundwater. This wasn’t just another earthquake caused by the subterranean disposal of wastewater from fracking, like she dealt with on a daily basis, but a potentially disastrous contamination issue, which was why she and her team were forced to wear CBRN isolation suits matching those of their HAZMAT escort.
Sydney Partridge tromps through the field beside her. The cumbersome suit makes the young seismologist appear even smaller than she is. She carries the digital seismometer in one hand and its instrumentation in the other. Tim Telford had offered to help her, despite being overburdened by his own infrasound sensors, but she’d declined, largely because she knew how the geophysicist felt about her. The Hazardous Materials Response Team had its own equipment, which Rana would be more than happy if they never had any reason to use.
The grass gives way to bare earth, where absolutely nothing is able to grow. She’s still contemplating how bad it must have been if this is what progress looks like when she sees the jagged chunks of concrete standing from the earth.
“There it is,” she says.
Lightning-bolt crevices riddle the hardpan, none of them more than six inches deep. The hole at the center, however, is a heck of a lot deeper than that.
Rana climbs up onto an arched section of concrete that must have once been part of the containment shell and stares down into darkness that stretches seemingly to the planet’s core.
“I’M PICKING UP some strange seismic readings from down there,” Sydney says.
“What do you mean?” Rana asks, and crouches behind her so she can better see the monito
r on her colleague’s laptop.
“That’s just it. They’re hard to qualify. The seismogram is incredibly sensitive and displays every little vibration. We’re talking air traffic and passing cars. In an area like this we’re dealing with an absurd amount of interference, but I can tell you that something down there is causing faint, irregular vibrations similar in amplitude to waves on the ocean.”
“You think there’s still fluid down there?”
“It’s possible, but that’s definitely not the source of the vibrations.”
“I’m picking up sound in the infrasonic range, too,” Tim says. “Nothing I’d attribute to tectonic activity, though. More like the resonance of air flowing into an enclosed space, a subtle increase in pressure like you feel in your ears when you change altitude.”
“The well must still be patent,” Rana says.
“That’s a safe assumption.”
One of the men from the HAZMAT response team scuffs across the dirt behind Rana. She glances back and reads the nameplate on his isolation suit: Stephens.
“We’re picking up high concentrations of volatile organic compounds,” he says. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with the suits for the duration. And I wouldn’t suggest lighting a match. There’s enough benzene in the ground to burn for weeks.”
He turns and heads back toward where his team is already cordoning off the area.
“How deep is that well?” she calls after him.
Hellhole Page 10
