The Panic Zone

41

Over Africa

A lightning bolt of pain tore into Dr. Sutsoff’s skull as her Alitalia airbus climbed over the Mediterranean.

Her condition had triggered an attack.

It was brought on by the throngs of passengers queued in the security lines at Tripoli International Airport where she’d boarded her connection.

People everywhere-nudging her, bumping her, intruding into her space, looking at her, talking to her, breathing on her, their skin touching hers.

She wanted to scream.

Her mouth had dried, her heartbeat soared, cutting her breath short. Talons of pain clawed down her spine to her toes, forcing her to clench her jaw, mash her knees together and grip her armrests.

She didn’t need this now.

Not when she was about to commence the decisive phase of her work.

She reached for her pills, put two in her palm, swallowed them and set her head into her headrest, thankful no one was beside her. She always paid for the seat next to her, to keep anyone from getting too close.

As the plane leveled her discomfort ebbed.

Agoraphobia. Demophobia. Enochlophobia. Ochlophobia.

She knew the terms but refused to label her condition a phobia. Her fear and loathing of crowds was not irrational. It was grounded in reality, in the old horror that was reaching for her…pulling her back…

“Gretchen! Help me! Gretchen!”

She shut her eyes, gained control of her breathing and directed her thoughts back to the time of joy in her life.

She was a happy little girl again flying above old London at night.

Flying like Peter Pan and Wendy, and dreaming of living in London with her mother, her father and little brother, Will.

But her family had to leave England. It broke her heart. Of all the cities in the world that they’d lived in, Gretchen had loved London best. On the day they packed, she cried. Her father crouched beside her and dried her tears.

“In a few years when my work is finished, we’ll come back to London and we’ll live here,” he said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

He’d told her that they would live in Kensington, her favorite part of the city, and later that night Gretchen had dreamed she was flying over it with her little brother.

“We’re going to live here forever, Willy.”

But her dream died.

Gretchen Rosamunde Sutsoff was born in Virginia where her father, Cornelius, was a scientist who’d become an American diplomat. He was a science attache who worked with U.S. military and intelligence officials at U.S. embassies. His job meant they’d moved around the world. Every two years it seemed. They’d lived in Moscow, Tokyo, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Nairobi, London, Panama and Vridekistan.

Gretchen’s mother, Katherine, was a pianist who gave lessons to students who would come to their home. “Music is the universal language. It makes words unnecessary,” her mother liked to say.

Gretchen’s parents loved her and Will, but they were self-absorbed precise people whose displays of affection toward them were as rare as falling stars. The family’s constant moving meant they were continually severing ties in one country while establishing new ones in another.

Gretchen and Will had no connection to any place or anybody.

Except each other.

Forever the new, strange child with the accent, Gretchen was often confused about where she belonged. She seldom made friends. Will was her best friend and she was protective of him as she sought refuge in her books, particularly books about science and the nature of life and death.

Wherever they lived, Gretchen always had the highest grades in her class. She astounded her teachers. “Your daughter is a prodigy,” her instructor in Moscow said. Another teacher in London said, “We feel the term genius is appropriate. She actually pointed out two errors in the mathematics textbook.”

Gretchen was ten years old when she started conducting her own research with Will as her assistant. Her parents allowed her to have a dozen white mice. While botched piano concertos sounded through their home, Gretchen tracked the life cycle of her mice, making exhaustive notes on their development, on which pairs mated, then tracing and noting characteristics of their offspring.

“Pretty cool, huh, Will?”

“Cool.”

Will was in charge of naming them and would have funerals when one of them died. He cried when they buried them. Gretchen would roll her eyes. She was more concerned with her new scientific discoveries.

They were living in Africa when she experienced a prophetic incident.

At the edge of the diplomatic quarter in Nairobi, there was a dense forest. Venomous snakes were sighted there by locals. One man was bitten and died. People were warned to keep out of the woods. But Gretchen needed butterflies for one of her many studies, so one day she left school early and slipped into the forest.

She had entered a darkened section. As birds screeched, she began searching. It was not long before she came upon a rare Taita blue-banded swallowtail on a broad leaf. Withdrawing a wide-mouth jar from her satchel, she inched it into position when she heard a moan.

She turned and saw a muddied stream flowing over a boulder.

That’s what it looked like.

She gasped. Gooseflesh rose on her arms.

The stream was a moving river of ants: millions, maybe billions of them. The ant-covered lump-judging from the single fear-filled eye staring from it and the protruding tongue-was a dog, panting in the throes of death.

The ants had attacked en masse. Devouring the dog alive.

Horrified, Gretchen was transfixed.

She was fascinated by the idea of the sheer terror of knowing that you could be helpless to battle the consuming force that is slowly killing you.

She ran home with the image seared in her mind.

“Gretchen! Help me! Gretchen!”

The flight attendant touched her shoulder.

“Please move your seat forward. We’re landing in Casablanca.”

Relief.

Casablanca’s Mohammed V International was not busy when Dr. Sutsoff arrived. She had time for a light lunch, a salad, cheese and tea. She checked her encrypted e-mail for a status report from her support team.

“All is ready. We await your arrival, Doctor.”

Good, she thought, boarding her connection, a 737 operated by Royal Air Maroc. During the six-hour flight, she read over her files and napped until images of her brother, her mother and father drove her from sleep.

When she was fourteen, her parents had sent her to boarding school in Lucerne, Switzerland.

“It will be hard,” her father said, “but the Lucerne boarding school is one of the best. It’ll give you a solid foundation for any college.”

Gretchen’s perfect grades had attracted the attention of Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford and La Sorbonne in Paris. The only thing she loved more than her studies was getting letters from Will. She often traced her fingers over his cheerful handwriting. She could hear his voice, see his smile.

Hi Gretchie,

Have you discovered the cure for everything yet? Guess what!? Since we moved to Vridekistan, football, or what they call soccer in America, is my new passion. It’s the biggest sport in the world, you know! Dad takes me to games. Vridekistan’s team could qualify for the World Cup. They have a match coming up against the powerhouse team from Iran. It’s going to be historic! Dad’s got tickets and says we can all go when you come home to visit next week. Say you will come! It will be loads of fun!

Love, Will

He made her laugh.

Of course she would go to the game. But she doubted her mother would go. Gretchen could understand her father’s interest in football. He enjoyed sports. But she could not envision her mother, the refined pianist, among the hordes of sports fanatics. That’s why Gretchen’s jaw dropped when she agreed to go.

“It will be exciting. A chance for a family outing,” her mother said.

The match was held at the national stadium, a monstrous multitiered facility with a capacity for 102,000 spectators. The game was critical to the country’s spirit, according to the president, who declared a national holiday. The newspapers reported that officials were expecting huge overflow crowds and Gretchen’s father insisted they leave hours before the start.

Traffic jammed the streets to the stadium, so the family abandoned their cab, joined the crowds walking to the stadium and managed to get to their seats ninety minutes before the match started.

The colorful pregame events energized the fans. Emotion electrified the air. Thunder exploded when the national team took to the field. A few seconds passed before Gretchen realized it was fanatical cheering. Flags waved everywhere amid the oceans of people, and battle hymns were sung in unison while the Iranian players were jeered and bombarded with rotting fruit. The mass of humanity roared with such intensity the entire stadium trembled. Gretchen saw unease cloud her mother’s face.

Will was enraptured and he joined the chanting, which did not relent, even when the match started.

The first half of the game was controlled by Iran, which had scored two goals. A man sitting near Gretchen and her father was also listening to the game on his radio and said there were reports of huge crowds, maybe another 250,000 people, surrounding the stadium. They were angry the national team was losing and were demanding entry to the game.

Police had locked all the gates.

“It’s madness.”

Inside, the disappointed stadium crowd tossed trash onto the field, forcing stadium crews to turn hoses on the unruly sections.

Gretchen heard her mother shout into her father’s ear.

“I have a bad feeling,” she said. “I think we should leave now.”

“I was thinking the same,” he said, then shouted to Will and Gretchen. “This place is getting dicey. We’re going to make our way to the exit, now.”

“But, Dad!” Will protested.

“Now, Will!”

The family threaded their way toward their gate. It was difficult because every inch of the stadium was crammed. They were about halfway to their exit, south gate 48, when the national team scored its first goal, igniting an ear splitting frenzy and the stadium shook. Will joined the celebration, jumping up and down.

The goal detonated waves of jubilation among the crowds outside the stadium. Enthralled, they began surging toward the locked gate, pressing at every point while security people tried to repel them. At west gate 56, the crowds broke through and desperate police began firing tear gas at the crowds outside the gates, but winds blew it back into the jammed walkways.

Confusing police radio signals were misunderstood and officers at every gate began firing tear gas into the crowds, filling the walkways at every gate, including south gate 48, where Gretchen and her family were stuck in their struggle to get out of the stadium.

Billowing clouds of tear gas were thought to be smoke from a fire, alarming the people seated inside who feared the stadium was ablaze. Fans panicked and rushed to the walkways, crushing those already immobilized by locked exit gates. Ammonia from the tear gas made people cough, gasp and vomit.

It blurred their vision.

“Oh, God!” Gretchen’s mother screamed. “Will! Cornelius! Gretchen!”

The crush forced Gretchen’s family tight against the crowds choking the walkway. Gretchen felt her mother’s hand seize hers, as Gretchen grabbed Will’s hand. Her father had Gretchen’s shoulder and Will’s hand.

“Hang on, kids! Don’t let go!”

The pressure was enormous as people began jumping from the upper tiers. Gretchen turned and saw others stampeding toward them from across the playing field!

No. Please. No more.

Now, as Gretchen’s plane began its descent, she swallowed hard.

She knew what was coming. She could not stop it. She glanced at the sky and clamped her eyes shut and bit her bottom lip as the horrible images swirled around her.

The stadium had become a cauldron of hell.

People screaming. Whistles bleating. A foot on her father’s shoulder. Waves of men scrambling above the paralyzed crowds. A sharp kick to her head. Blood trickling. Her mother collapsing under two men, then three more stamping her, then more bodies stamping on her from above.

Wake up from this nightmare! Wake up!

“Nooo!”

Shoes, boots, fists smashing on her father. Her father falling to his knees. More bodies raining down from the upper levels. Thudding, cracking on them, forcing people down.

“Daddy!”

Gretchen struggling to keep on her feet. Her mother’s grip loosening. Her mother’s fingers slipping from hers.

“Mom!”

Her mother vanishing. The light above blotted by wave after wave of frantic bodies. Crawling above them, falling from above, wedging into the immobile mass.

Smells of body odor, sweat, tobacco breath.

Fear.

And death.

Blood flowing everywhere.

“Noooooo!”

A boot grazing her mother’s skull, tearing a chunk of her scalp clean off.

“Mom!”

Her father being trampled to the ground, his body lost in a pulpy blur of stamping.

“Daddy!”

She felt Will’s hand tight in hers, his warm little hand.

“Gretchen! Help me! Gretchen!”

She did not let go of his hand, but she couldn’t see him anymore.

“Nooo!”

One of Will’s arms disappeared into a crush of solid bodies. Compressed so tight people were suffocating.

Bones snapping, organs compressing like accordions.

A heart-wrenching squeal.

Will.

“Gretch-help meee!”

His hand went limp.

Lifeless, it protruded from the tangle of corpses.

The death of innocence. The death of reason before her eyes.

“Will!”

Her baby brother was dead.

Her mother was dead.

Her father was dead.

Gretchen fell into a dream-trance. Helpless to battle the consuming force that was slowly killing her, she prayed.

God, I beg you to let me live.

She felt an overwhelming force slowly ending her life.

And the ants devour their prey.

She felt her blood pressure slipping, slipping. Her life slipping, slipping…away. God, I beg you…

The 737 shuddered.

The flaps adjusted the jet’s approach with hydraulic groans.

The landing gear grumbled down into position and locked.

Dr. Sutsoff blinked her troubled memories away, inhaled and took in the outskirts of Yaounde and the dark forests beyond. She’d come to Cameroon to complete the most critical-most dangerous-aspect of her work.

God had let her live.

She’d come to avenge her family’s death by correcting the error of human evolution.

For here she would find the last key to her ultimate goal.

To exterminate the ants.