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.
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.
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 can’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?’
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.’
