The Calm Before The Swarm

I

Lithium Springs, Georgia

Dr. Lauren Allen pulled up to the barricade in a wash of red and blue lights and rolled down the window of her Sahara Silver Audi A5. A uniformed officer accepted her proffered badge jacket without a word and compared her identification against the list on his clipboard. His upper lip glistened with a liberal application of Vick's VapoRub. She could smell it even over the divine scent of the Mongolian beef in the Styrofoam container on the seat beside her. The call had come in during dinner, forcing her box up more than half of her meal. Had she known what the night would bring, she would have gone for the shrimp with lobster sauce. The onions and peppers were murder on her digestive system.

"Thank you, Dr. Allen." The officer passed back her credentials. "Pull into the lot to the left and follow the first row to the end. You'll be able to see where to go from there."

Lauren nodded and rolled up her window. The officer passed through her headlights and dragged aside the barricade long enough for her to pull through. She turned into the dirt lot as she'd been instructed and followed the uneven rows of older model cars, dirty pickup trucks, and a smattering of tractors toward the logjam to the east. Half a dozen vans were parked at the edge of the lot and in the weeds beside a path that led down into a copse of sycamores. The large Ford Econolines were stenciled with the names of their official offices, lest the drivers forget which one was theirs. Fulton County Coroner. The Evidence Collection Team from the Atlanta Police Department. Fulton County Sheriff's Department. The two unmarked vans were designed to be inconspicuous, but instead only drew attention to themselves. At least she now knew that the FBI had commandeered the investigation, which meant that, with any luck, she'd be home by breakfast.

She parked behind one of the ECT vans, confident that they wouldn't be leaving anytime soon, and walked around to her trunk, which she popped with the tap of a button on her keychain. Her positive-pressure personnel suit was folded neatly next to her oversize briefcase. She slipped the baggy gear over her smart skirt suit, sealed the plastic shield over her face and shoulder length blonde hair, and grabbed the plastic case. Perhaps her attire would prove to be overkill, but people tended to shy away from her and let her do her work in peace when she wore it, as though she were the one who was contagious.

The sodium halide glare from the east guided her through the sycamore grove. She intentionally walked in the grass beside the path so as not to disturb any potentially important footprints and strolled down the emerald knoll toward the source of the glow. She smelled the telltale stench of the early stages of decomposition and adjusted the flow of air through the suit's filtration device.

A lone Lithium Springs Police Department cruiser was parked at the bottom of the hill. Poor rube must have been the first on the scene. Beyond it, the fairgrounds were littered with the trappings of a low-rent traveling circus. The obligatory red- and white-striped big top. Games of chance. Rickety rides more rust than metal. The entire inner grounds swarmed with law enforcement officers and forensics techs from every county, state, and federal entity. All of them wore masks, gloves, and generic yellow isolation smocks over their uniforms and suits. Silver-domed stadium lights were mounted to trees, tripods, and even the surrounding claptrap booths, all of them directed toward the massive tent.

Lauren encountered the first remains fifty yards out from the ticket booth, amid a scattering of trash. The body lay prone in the grass, arms pinned beneath it. Height, build, and apparel were all definitively male. A small fluorescent pink flag with the number one was staked into the ground near the man's head. The weeds were tacky with blood and bodily dissolution. The smell was malodorous, but definitely fresh. He hadn't been dead for more than three or four hours. The back of his head was lumpy and misshapen. His shaved scalp was only now beginning to stubble.

She crouched and inspected the soft tissue swelling over the base of his skull and his neck. Each knot was roughly the size of a half-dollar. She pressed the center of one, which dimpled under the slightest pressure. It took several seconds to resume its normal fluid-filled appearance after she removed her finger. In the middle of each one was a tiny black dot from which purplish-red striations originated like forked bolts of lightning. She lifted the collar of his shirt. More wounds covered his back, although in nowhere near the same concentration. The brunt of the attack had been confined to his head.

Easing her hands under his shoulder, she rolled him away from the ground to inspect his face. A waste of time. The features were so swollen and livid with settled blood that she couldn't see more than the faint impression of a mouth, nose, and eyes. More black dots, more striations. She let the body roll flat again, opened her briefcase, and removed several items from their inserts. With a pair of sharp forceps, she gripped the end of one of the black dots and teased out what looked like a splinter, which she immediately placed in a collection bag. A globule of amber pustulates bloomed from the tiny hole. She used a syringe to capture it and drained the knot dry.

She closed her briefcase and resumed her trek toward the main tent. The silhouette of the ticket agent in the booth welcomed her. A flash from a criminalist's camera revealed the deformed head.

Lauren passed through the gate and parted a sea of investigators. Forensics teams pored over every available surface in search of evidence. One even walked through the area with a digital video recorder in an attempt to capture the entire scene as they had found it. And it was definitely a massive scene. Corpses were everywhere on the hay-littered dirt, crumpled on their chests as though they had died even as they ran. Small pink flags marked their passing. They were marked with a series of numbers from twelve through twenty-eight. All of their heads were similarly swollen, parting their hair with odd cowlicks. Men, women, children. Most wore jeans and flannel shirts. Some of the women wore cheap dresses and scuffed high heel shoes, as though a night at the circus passed for high society in this rural section of Georgia.

A Sheriff's Deputy waved her through the flaps and closed them again behind her. There was no dialing down the smell this time. The stench hit her in the gut and again she tasted her Mongolian beef, which had been much better the first time. Fortunately, she had dabbed enough perfume under her blouse that a shift of her shoulders released a bouquet of jasmine and lilac that almost spared her from the smell of death. Almost.

She stood in the main aisle and absorbed everything around her. Stadium bleachers had been erected in nearly a complete circle around the inside of the massive tent. From her vantage point, she could only see the metal support structures and the undersides of the wooden slats to either side, but the gaps overhead between the seats were filled with lower legs and feet. None of them moved. Directly ahead was the main ring. A group of suit-clad agents had gathered in the center under the tightrope and trapezes. Bodies littered the ground all around them. The spotlights still shined down on the carnage. There were performers of all kinds: the ornately-garbed ringmaster, young women in sequined leotards, animal handlers in elaborate costumes, filthy carnies, and a colorful assortment of painted clowns. A lion, a tiger, and a parade of elephants. All lifeless on the dirt, scattered as though a tornado had blown through. It was a truly mortifying sight.

One of the agents saw her and tipped his chin. He broke away from the others, strode directly toward her, and offered his gloved hand.

"Special Agent Maxwell Cranston," he said. "And you must be Dr. Allen from the CDC."

Lauren nodded and inspected him over his mask. He had dark eyes and hair slicked back with so much gel it seemed to absorb the scarlet glow from the lights strung up in the rafters. An air of confidence surrounded him. Unfortunately, that air reeked of the hundreds of corpses packed into the tent.

He gestured toward the center ring and fell into step beside her.

"Have you had a chance to examine any of the remains yet?" he asked.

"We both know the cause of death, but as far as the presence of any sort of communicable pathogen, we're going to have to wait for a lab analysis of whatever samples I procure."

They walked out from between the bleachers and Lauren gasped at the scope of the slaughter. The stadium seats were nearly filled to capacity. There had to be easily four hundred people collapsed on the metal slopes. Tangled in the aisles. Lying on top of one another. Clumped in mounds. She saw parents who had tried to shield their children with their bodies, elderly couples who had been trampled in the momentary stampede, baby carriages and wheelchairs, still occupied. These people had seen death coming, but had been unable to move fast enough to escape. Agents and officers in their isolation gear threaded through the masses, taking pictures and gathering whatever evidence they could find.

"From what I've seen," Lauren said, "there are no outward signs of contagion, viral or bacterial. It doesn't look like there was even enough time for anything to pass between them. That doesn't necessarily rule out an infectious agent, though. If there's anything in the samples, we'll find it."

"Then that ought to make your job here pretty easy."

He glanced over at her. His mask stretched over a smile. There was obviously something he wasn't telling her.

Cranston led her past the congregation of suits, whose voices lowered when she neared, and to the center of the ring. She recognized the massive bucket-shaped platforms the elephants used to rise to their full height and the man with the whip who encouraged them to do so. The tough, leathery hide had protected the elephants from the worst of the assault, yet their skin still bubbled with what looked like gray boils.

"We know the cause of death was the sheer number of bee stings to the head and face," Cranston said. "We just don't understand why they attacked like they did, why their stings were so toxic, or where they came from."

One of the elephants was in much worse shape than the others. A gaping wound framed its abdomen, fringed by tatters of gray hide, viscera spilled out all over the ground. The bowels were thoroughly destroyed, torn apart.

Lauren could only stare at the mess. This was why she was here. Suddenly, she realized that she wouldn't be going home anytime soon.

"I can tell you where they came from." She pointed at the mess of entrails. "They chewed their way out of their host. A better question would be...where are they now?"