The Calm Before The Swarm

Lauren curled up under a blanket on the couch in the living room of her upscale Centennial Park North townhouse, not far from Centennial Olympic Park and the Georgia Aquarium. The space was dark, thanks to the aluminum sheets sealed over the windows and affixed to the seams around the doors. The brass glare from the lone lamp on the table beside her provided the only illumination. It cast strange webbed shadows on the walls from the multiple layers of mosquito netting she had strung up in the center of the room. Inside the mesh tent were only the couch, an end table, and a coffee table on top of which her television perched. Her beekeeper's suit was folded neatly on the cushion beside her. She fondled the remote control and tried to summon the courage to press the power button to turn it on.

It was Easter Day. More than two months had passed and they were still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Every emergency from the police to the military waited at heightened levels of preparedness, while FEMA was all set to swoop in and manage the aftermath. They all prayed that nothing would happen, and with each passing day, their hopes rose. The public-at-large was blissfully unaware of the threat, and, by Presidential decree, would remain that way until the very last moment. She could feel their overall confidence growing as one week bled into the next without incident, until it bordered on arrogance.

But Lauren knew better. This was the calm before the storm.

The missing bodies were incubating their lethal parasites.

And it was only a matter of time before they were fully mature.

The woman who had served as the host vessel for the wasps that had killed her team at the CDC had been identified as Niraj Khouri, an architect and project manager for New South Construction, the company that had underbid the competition for the expansion of the east wing of the Emerging Infectious Diseases building. Her background had been thoroughly vetted and security clearance issued. The same had gone for each and every member of her thirty-eight man crew, which had been behind schedule and working, fully staffed, on a Sunday to catch up. No one had thought it suspicious at the time, even considering it was Super Bowl Sunday, the day the entire world simply stopped turning. Within minutes of Khouri's attack, her crew had materialized through the swarms of wasps in the hallways outside of the quarantine room in full beekeeper's garb, driving wheeled pallets, kicking the bodies of Lauren's colleagues out of the way to clear a path. They had bypassed the security doors in seconds, heaped the carts with body bags, and vanished back into the construction zone. In less than twenty minutes, from start to finish, a caravan of three New South panel trucks passed through the main security gate, promptly split up, and disappeared onto the highways and back roads. Not one of them had turned up yet.

The man they knew as Dipak Patel had received an incoming call on his disposable cell phone while he was still inside the transport vehicle with the four Marines. One of them remembered thinking it odd that the screen had lit up, but there had been no ringing sound. It had taken a full sixty traumatizing minutes for the wasps to die, with only the thick fabric of their suits and Patel's body to sting.

No political demands had been made. No organizations had claimed responsibility. No rumors abounded on the internet. It was a perfectly coordinated plan with a motive cloaked in mystery.

More than five hundred people were dead already, and yet it felt like they were just marking the seconds until disaster finally struck on an almost apocalyptic scale.

Lauren pressed the power button. While she waited for the picture on the flat screen to bloom, she lined up the EpiPens on the coffee table and neurotically checked their expiration dates.

Her landline started to ring. A heartbeat later, so did her cell phone. Her pager followed and she heard the chime of incoming email from her laptop. By the time the television came to life, she already knew what must have happened.

An expansive overhead shot of Disney World. She saw the Magic Castle and Main Street USA, and the thousands of corpses lying on the asphalt, stretching as far as the eye could see.

'...in an unprecedented swarming attack that has apiologists struggling to explain...'

She changed the channel.

'...witnessing this live from Times Square...'

More bodies. Everywhere. Smoke roiled over the street from behind the shattered windows of upscale storefronts.

Again, she changed the channel.

'...on what authorities now speculate may have been a coordinated strike by...'

Men and women in suits littered Capitol Hill. Papers blew from open briefcases, the only sign of movement on the jerky footage, obviously shot from a helicopter.

'...have just learned that a radical Jihadist group has claimed responsibility...'

She clapped her hands over her ears to block out the ringing and beeping and chiming and the awful words of the frantic reporters. She saw images of the Mall of the Americas, the Vegas Strip, Atlantic City, Pike Place in Seattle. All locations that had defined America in life, now marked her passing. Bourbon Street, the San Diego Zoo, Centennial Olympic Park...

Lauren closed her eyes for a long moment before opening them once more.

She rose from the couch as if in a trance, walked to the front door, and pressed her eye to the peephole. The wood vibrated against her palms.

A black cloud swelled over the horizon, obliterating the midtown skyline, rushing outward over the units on the other side of the park.

Lauren ran for the safety of the mosquito netting and her protective suit as the ravenous thunderhead devoured her condo with a buzzing sound that drowned out her screams.

BONUS MATERIAL

DISEASEATER

An Exclusive Short Story

'Cash up front,' Anders said as soon as the door swung inward.

'We only have three thousand,' the old man who answered said. He stood at the edge of the light from the hallway and the darkness from within, trapped in that transition zone of shadows. The wrinkles on his face were exaggerated by the contrast, his liver spots like amoebae on a lab slide.

'Then I suggest you use it to buy a casket,' Anders said, turning away from the door and starting back down the dim corridor toward the stairs.

'Wait!' the old man called after him. Then more softly, 'Please.'

Anders stopped, but didn't turn around.