The Calm Before The Swarm

There'll be a team ready and waiting to assist with the prisoner transfer.'

'We're staying with him every step of the way,' the man to her left said.

'I wouldn't have it any other way.'

The Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory was in Building 18. Lauren had been driving this route for so long that she recognized each of the turns without being able to see them, right down to the swooping ramp that led up to the building. The truck slowed and stopped. The engine continued to idle.

'We're at the service entrance, doc. But there's no one waiting for us.'

'What are you talking about? Are you sure you're at the right entrance?'

'Without a doubt.'

'Where are your people?' the man across from her asked. They were the first words he had spoken. His Arabic accent was affected by stilted British inflection. 'Is this the point where I should say loo-loo- loo-loo-loo?'

His predatory smile grew impossibly wide, crocodilian.

'Let me out,' Lauren whispered.

'Convoy's moving out, doc. Something's not right. No way in hell we're sticking around to find out---'

'Let me out!' Lauren screamed.

The rear door opened from the outside and Lauren scurried down onto the pavement in the midst of the twelve-vehicle convoy. There were military Jeeps and black SUVs. A helicopter thumped high above the treetops. She barely stepped to the side in time to keep from being run over by the transport vehicle in its hurry to back out. The other cars closed rank around it and hurriedly guided it back toward the main road with the squeal of rubber.

Two cars stayed with her; one a troop transport bearing a half-dozen armed soldiers, the other a federal SUV with the silhouettes of four agents behind the tinted windows.

She sprinted toward the glass doors and stopped dead in her tracks. A handful of wasps crawled on the inside of the glass, stinging at the transparent barrier. The tips of their abdomens left tiny smudges from the holes where their stingers had once been. As she watched, one of them dropped to the floor onto a mat of lifeless insect carcasses.

IV

Lauren's horror gave way to a kind of detached numbness as she walked through the hallways toward her lab. Dead wasps crunched underfoot. Her heartbeat thudded in her ears, punctuating the restless humming of the fluorescent tube lights. All else was silent. She passed the doorways of private offices, through which she saw the occasional body sprawled on the floor, head misshapen, clutching at its swollen throat. When she reached the lobby, she involuntarily stopped and stifled a gasp. The security officer at the desk had toppled backward in his chair. His face was so livid with fluid that his features were all but obscured. There were other corpses, felled in mid-stride, arms extended as though trying to drag themselves forward across the tile floor after their legs had failed them, but it was the lone figure at the epicenter of the nightmare, crumpled in a wide pool of shimmering blood, that drew Lauren's attention. The woman's abdomen had been torn open from sternum to pubis. The frayed edges of her dress framed the mess of macerated viscera that bloomed in sickly gray folds from her peritoneum. Despite the sheer number of stings to her face, Lauren recognized the woman immediately. It was the same raven-haired woman she had seen on the video, near the elephant pens, staring down at the sick pachyderm with terror etched onto her face. The woman she had erroneously mistaken for pregnant. A disposable cell phone---the twin to the one they had taken from the man at the game---rested only inches from her curled fingertips.

A cluster of wasps wheeled high above her, near the skylights. Several dropped to the floor and writhed at her feet.

The sound of footsteps reached her from behind as the soldiers thundered down the corridor in their heavy boots. They now wore camouflaged beekeeper's suits and carried automatic rifles. They assumed command the moment they entered the lobby. One barked orders while the others scattered in surreal movements that made her feel like she was witnessing the scene from underwater. One of the soldiers spoke into his transceiver, then picked up the cell phone, held it away from his body, and waited. The view screen lit up with the incoming call, but there was no ringtone. At least not one that she could hear. The few surviving wasps up in the rafters descended upon the phone in the man's hand. He allowed them to crawl on his glove as he scrolled through the list of incoming calls. He nodded pointedly to the soldier who appeared to be in charge.

'We were set up,' the man with the phone said. 'They used the game as a ruse to get all of us in one place, out of their way.'

It took Lauren a moment to grasp the implications of the statement.

'No!' she cried.

She whirled and broke into a sprint toward her lab. Panic flooded her veins. She started to hyperventilate, felt the warmth of tears on her cheeks.

'Please, God,' she whimpered. 'Please...no...'

She veered into the corridor to her wing and tripped over a body on the floor. They were everywhere. On the floor. In the doorways. Huddled together as though in an effort to attenuate the assault. Heads deformed by stingers. Bodies contorted by pain. Her team. Her entire team. All of the men and women beside whom she'd worked through the years, with whom she had jostled for space over microscopes and in clean rooms, with whom she'd labored and laughed, with whom she'd shared drinks and stories...

Dead.

All dead.

Her colleagues...her friends...every single one of them...dead.

Lauren crawled over the cold remains without looking at the woman's face. She somehow found her feet and managed to stagger through the maze of corpses to the quarantine room.

She stood outside of the airlock, her thumb poised over the fingerprint scanner to disengage the lock, knowing full well what she'd find inside.

This had never been about the three hundred people at the circus or even the hundred and fifty thousand at the Super Bowl. It was never about a political or religious statement to be viewed by millions around the world on live television.

It was much worse than that.

Lauren entered the air lock and passed the chemical showers and isolation suits hanging from the walls. She used her thumbprint to open the final seal and stared dumbly at the stainless steel door as it opened.

She sobbed as she staggered into the chilled room, and found it exactly as she had expected.

The body bags that had been stacked five-high to either side of the room...

The corpses teeming with countless millions of wasp larvae...

Gone.

EPILOGUE

Atlanta, Georgia