The Calm Before The Swarm

II

Lauren checked in with Special Agent Cranston just before noon and relayed her findings. He sounded less surprised than she had expected. His team had already identified the majority of the faceless decedents based primarily on the driver's licenses they found in the purses and wallets either on or near the remains. They were in the process of crosschecking the names against employment records in hopes of stumbling upon a motive while simultaneously bagging and tagging the corpses. CDC transport vehicles were running back and forth, hauling the bodies by the truckload to their quarantine station downstairs near the construction zone. Lauren imagined them stacked like corded wood against the rear wall in the warehouse-size chamber, in the space they had cleared by moving all of the stretchers out of the curtained partitions. Cranston had promised to sic his best dogs on the genetically engineered angle to determine which facilities were capable of pulling off something this ambitious.

In the meantime, she needed to scrutinize the samples. If the wasps had developed inside of the elephant, then it was definitely possible that they were growing inside of the hundreds of corpses they were unloading at this very moment. The last thing they wanted was their entire quarantine room swarming with wasps. And yet, at the same time, they did need to focus on the lifecycle of the insects, which undoubtedly meant they needed an experimental cross-section to hatch.

She shuddered at the thought of willingly allowing one of the corpses to become infested and torn apart on her table while she leaned over it in a beekeeper's suit.

Right now, a team of medical examiners was autopsying every tenth body. Thus far, the results were all the same. Their deaths were the result of the sheer amount of venom that hit the victims' bloodstreams at once, leading to anaphylactic shock. Their windpipes had closed due to the natural histamine reactions of their immune systems. In essence, they had all asphyxiated as one.

Blood was the key. It pumped through a complex highway of vessels that connected the heart to every organ, from arteries to arterioles and finally into the tiny capillaries that ran just beneath the surface of the skin and back again through venules and veins. This was the route that nearly every pathogenic microbe used to reach its ultimate destination inside the body. Airborne viruses accessed it through the mucus membranes in the respiratory tract and directly through the lungs. For other diseases, all it took was a simple transfer of fluids, or, in some cases, just the slightest physical contact or a passing of germs via a fomite like a doorknob. In this case, she suspected the wasps laid their eggs subcutaneously, and upon hatching, the larvae traveled through the blood into the digestive system where there was room to grow in the nutrient-rich maze of hollow tubes, in much the same fashion as tapeworms.

She studied the blood samples through an electron microscope on slides her lab assistants had prepared. Whole blood had been treated with heparin to prevent coagulation, while other samples had been centrifuged, which broke them down into their individual components. The skin and superficial samples of the human remains had all reflected what one would expect from a wasp sting. Nothing more, nothing less. The elephant's bowels had also been relatively normal, minus the sections where the ovipositors had become impaled in the lining. The mucosa had been dramatically inflamed in the immediate vicinity of the stingers, but there was no sign of infection or other physiological reaction, which suggested that the wasps had merely been content to develop inside of the animal until the external stimulus triggered the instinct that caused them to chew their way out. Eventually, the elephant would have starved to death, had it not been gutted from within first.

The sample of blood she now studied under 1000x magnification was from the man she had encountered on the lawn outside the fairgrounds, the bald man who'd been designated Number One by the pink flag near his head. He had presumably been nearest the exit flaps of the big top when everything had started to happen and made a break for it. He hadn't even made it a hundred yards. His blood was fairly common, which made him a good test subject. O positive. Clear toxicology screen, minus the preponderance of melittin. Standard increase in white blood cells to combat the sudden onslaught. Normal red blood cell and platelet counts. The only thing they found that shouldn't have been there were the small white ovals that vaguely resembled the platelets, only they were about a hundred times larger and less prevalent by a factor of ten thousand. Extrapolating the sample size to that of the entire bloodstream still intimated that there were hundreds of thousands of what she assumed to be egg sacs floating through the host.

Further magnification of the white ovals confirmed they had no method of locomotion. No flagella or cilia. They were at the mercy of the current. They appeared to be encapsulated in some sort of gelatinous protein coating with a mucus-like consistency that prevented it from sticking to any of the blood cells, the vessel lumen, or the other egg sacs. If that was indeed what they were. At this point, she could only speculate.

Lauren replaced the whole blood slide with one featuring the white dots exclusively. They'd been centrifuged to isolate them and placed in a saline solution. She wanted to test an idea that had been percolating in her head. The pH of blood was slightly basic---roughly 7.4---in comparison to that of the digestive tract. The small bowel maintained a slightly more acidic pH level of approximately 6.6, but that was nothing compared to the stomach, which pumped out gastric acid with a pH of under 2. Enteric drugs like acetaminophen and ibuprofen were coated with gelatin to ensure that the active ingredients wouldn't be released until they hit the stomach, where they would be absorbed as they progressed through the small bowel.

"Prepare a point five percent solution of hydrochloric acid," she said. "That should approximate the acidity of the stomach. And set up another slide with several of the egg sacs."

Lauren slid the slide out and waited for the new one. She scooted back from the video monitor attached to the microscope and turned it so they would all be able to see the reaction.

One of her assistants passed her a slide with an indentation the size of a thumbprint in the center. The sample was nearly invisible until she locked it into place under the lens. She focused on what looked like a cluster of white grapes, then increased the magnification until they filled the screen.

She leaned back from the monitor and felt the others crowd around her. All sounds of activity died. The resultant silence was marred only by the sounds of excited breathing and the hum of machinery.

Another assistant appeared at her side, holding the dilution she had requested.

Lauren gave him approval to proceed with a nod, and focused on the image on the screen.

The lens drew out of focus as the tip of a glass pipette appeared. A globule of fluid shivered and fell away. Then another. The cluster of eggs floated apart, then began to effervesce. The outer coating disintegrated into a fine white particulate mist. In the center of each, a dark shape drew contrast. It looked like a ring at first, before slowly opening into a C-shape. The remainder of the egg sac dissolved, leaving only a pale halo in the fluid around the larvae, like the whites of broken eggs around the yolks.

The larvae all started to wriggle at once, worming back and forth through the acidic solution.

"My God," Lauren whispered.

Blood flowed through the human body at a rate of anywhere between one-tenth of a centimeter per second in the peripheral vessels to forty centimeters per second near the trunk.

Conservative estimates suggested it had taken less than two minutes for the venom to trigger the fatal reaction that had caused all of the people in the tent to asphyxiate.

That was more than enough time for the eggs to pass through the bloodstream and enter the gastrointestinal tract, where they had been sitting in a puddle of stomach acid for more than sixteen hours now.

She imagined the massive quarantine room. It was negatively pressurized to prevent the air inside the chamber from contaminating the outside air. Was it sealed tightly enough that nothing could crawl out through the ducts?

She pictured the rows of body bags and the remains inside of them, their bowels expanding with the gasses of decomposition and teeming with wasp larvae.

She envisioned the corpses still lying in the field, out in the open, and the group of agents working the scene around them. The bowels churning even beneath the graying flesh.

And worst of all, she imagined a swarm of wasps hundreds of times the size of the one that had eaten through the elephant and killed every patron in the stands in a matter of seconds rolling over the suburbs of Atlanta like a storm cloud.