second day on Yu-naska had failed to reveal indications of the ailment in the local sea lion population, which added a small sense of relief to Sarah.
Blessed with high cheekbones and soft hazel eyes, the pretty scientist quickly ambled the two miles back to camp, easily spotting the trio of bright red tents some distance away. A squat, bearded man wearing a flannel shirt and a worn Seattle Mariners baseball cap was rummaging through a large cooler when Sarah approached the campsite.
“Sarah, there you are. Sandy and I were just making plans for lunch,” Irv Fowler said with a smile. An easygoing man on the thin side of fifty, Fowler looked and acted like a man ten years his junior.
A petite redheaded woman crawled out of one of the nearby tents clutching a pot and ladle. “Irv's always making plans for lunch,” Sandy Johnson responded with a grin while rolling her eyes.
“How did you two make out this morning?” Sarah inquired as she grabbed an empty campstool and sat down.
“Sandy's got the stats. We checked a large colony of Steller's on the eastern beach and they all looked fat and healthy. I found one cadaver, but by all appearances the fellow looked like he expired from old age. I took a tissue sample for lab analysis just to be sure.” While he spoke, Fowler pumped the primer on a propane gas camp stove, then lit the hissing gas escaping beneath the burner, the blue flame igniting with a poof.
“That's consistent with what I observed as well. It appears that the affliction has not spread to the sea lions of charming Yunaska,” Sarah replied, her eyes sweeping the green landscape around them.
“We can check the colony on the west coast of the island this afternoon, since our pilot won't be back to pick us up until morning.”
“That will be a bit of a hike. But we can stop for a chat at the Coast Guard station, which I recall our pilot saying was manned this time of year.”
“In the meantime,” Fowler announced, placing the large pot on the portable stove, “it's time for the specialty of the house.”
“Not that fire-belching-” Sandy tried to declare before being cut off.
“Yes, indeed. Cajun chili du jour,” Fowler grinned, while scraping the lumpy brown contents of a large tin can into the heated pot.
“As they say in N'Awlins,” Sarah said with a laugh, “Laisse^ k bon temps rouler.”
Ed Stimson peered intently at a weather radar monitor watching a slight buildup of white electronic clouds fuzz up the upper portion of the green screen. It was a moderate storm front, some two hundred miles to the southwest, that Stimson accurately predicted would douse their island with several days of soggy weather. His concentration was interrupted by a rapping sound overhead. Barnes was still up on the tin roof fooling with the anemometer.
Static-filled chatter suddenly blared through the hut from a radio set mounted on a corner wall. Nearby fishing boats, their captains yakking about the weather, constituted most of the garbled radio traffic received on the island. Stimson did his best to tune out the meaningless chatter and, at first, failed to detect the odd whooshing sound. It was a low resonance emanating from outside. Then the radio fell silent for a moment and he could clearly hear a rushing sound in the distance, something similar to a jet aircraft. For several long seconds, the odd noise continued, seeming to diminish slightly in intensity before ending altogether in a loud crack.
Thinking it might be thunder, Stimson adjusted the scale view on his weather radar to a twenty-mile range. The monitor showed only a light scattering of clouds in the immediate vicinity, with nothing resembling thunderheads. Must be the Air Force up to some tricks, he figured, recalling the heavy air traffic in the Alaskan skies during the days of the Cold War.
His thoughts were broken by a crying wail outside the door from the pet husky named Max.
“What is it, Max?” Stimson called out while opening the door to the hut.
The Siberian husky let out a death-shrieking howl as it turned, shaking, toward his master in the doorway. Stimson was shocked to see the dog's eyes glazed in a vacant stare while thick white foam oozed from his mouth. The dog stood teetering back and forth for a moment, then keeled over on its side, hitting the ground with a thud.
“Jesus! Mike, get down here quick,” Stimson yelled to his partner.
Barnes was already climbing down the ladder from the roof but was having a hard time catching the rungs with his feet. Nearing the ground, he missed the last rung with his left foot altogether and lurched to the ground, staying semierect only by a hearty hand grasp on the ladder's rung.
“Mike, the dog just ... are you okay?” Stimson asked, realizing something was not right. Running to his partner's side, he found Barnes in a state of labored breathing, and his eyes were nearly as glassy as Max's. Throwing his arm around the younger man's shoulder, Stimson half carried, half dragged Barnes into the shack and set him down in a chair.
Barnes bent over and retched violently, then sat upright, clinging to Stimson's arm for support. Gasping in a hoarse voice, he whispered, “There's something in the air.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth when his eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he fell over stone dead.
Stimson stood up in a state of shock, then found that the room was spinning like a top before his eyes. A throbbing pain racked his head while the grip of an iron vise suddenly began squeezing the air out of his lungs. Staggering to the radio, he tried to let out a brief cry for help but was unsure whether his lips could move because of numbness to his face. A burst of heat flared internally, like an invisible fire was consuming his organs. Choking for air and losing all sense of vision, he staggered and fell hard to the floor, dead before he hit the ground.
Four miles east of the Coast Guard station, the three CDC scientists were just finishing their lunch when the invisible wave of death struck. Sarah was the first to detect something wrong when a pair of birds flying overhead suddenly stopped in mid flight as if they had struck an invisible wall and then fell to the ground wriggling. Sandy fell victim first, clutching her stomach and doubling over in agony.
“Come now, my chili wasn't that bad,” Fowler joked before he, too, became light-headed and nauseous.
Sarah stood and took a few steps toward the cooler to retrieve some bottled water when fire shot through her legs and her thigh muscles began to spasm.
“What's happening?” Fowler gasped as he tried to comfort Sandy before staggering to the ground in distress.
For Sarah, time seemed to slow as her senses became dulled. Sluggishly, she dropped to the ground as her muscles weakened and refused to obey the commands sent by her brain. Her lungs seemed to constrict upon themselves, making each breath a painful stab of agony. A thumping noise began to ring through her ears as she fell prone on her back and stared blurry-eyed at the gray sky above. She felt the blades of grass dance and rustle against her body, but she was frozen, unable to move.
Gradually, a fog enveloped her mind and a field of blackness began to encroach the edges of her vision. But a sudden intrusion jarred her senses momentarily. Into the sea of gray popped an apparition, a strange ghost with a tuft of black hair over a rubbery face that seemed to melt away like plastic. She felt the alien gaze upon her with frightening giant, three-inch-wide crystal eyes. But there appeared to be another set of eyes beyond the crystal lenses, gazing intently at her with a sense of grace and warmth. A pair of deep, opaline green eyes. Then everything turned to black.
Sarah opened her eyes to a gray canopy above her, only this one was flat and without clouds. Shaking off the blurriness, her eyes slowly regained focus and she could see that it was not the sky above her but a ceiling. A softness beneath her revealed that she was lying in a bed with a thick pillow under her head. An oxygen mask was covering her face, which she removed, but she left alone the intravenous needle that was stuck in her arm. Carefully taking in the surroundings, her eyes gazed upon a small, simply decorated room featuring a small writing desk in one corner with an impressive painting of an old ocean liner above it, while off to the side was a small bath. The bed she lay in was mounted to the wall and the open door to a hallway had a step over threshold. The whole room seemed to be rolling, and she was uncertain if it was her head creating the motion as a result of the deep throbbing sensation that pounded at her temples.
A movement caught her eye and she turned back to the doorway to find a figure standing there, looking at her with a slight grin. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, but on a fit and somewhat wiry frame. He was young,
