The Calm Before The Swarm

IV

Lauren entered the quarantine room wearing a full beekeeper's suit. The white cotton and polyester blend fabric hung loosely from her body, while the leather boots and gloves were snug all the way up to her knees and biceps. She wore a helmet under a hooded veil, which hung over her face to the middle of her chest. Beneath the mesh was a biohazard mask with a Plexiglas face shield and a mouthpiece attached to the portable oxygen tank strapped to her back. All of the ventilation ducts had been plugged with a two-foot layer of steel wool that would allow an insecticidal mist to be forced into the room, but wouldn't permit any of the wasps to pass through in the opposite direction. With the impeded circulation, the air was stifling and oppressive, despite the cooling units set up throughout the room to slow the rate of decomposition. The smell was like nothing she had ever experienced before. The body bags were stacked five-high against the side walls in some places, and ran the length of the room. They weren't going to be able to release the remains to the next of kin until they were embalmed, the larvae flushed from their systems, their blood replaced with formaldehyde.

They'd been able to keep a lid on the nature of the disaster, at least for now. It was only a matter of time before they needed to make a statement, however. Accidental exposure to noxious gasses was undoubtedly the story they would tell. In this case, a lie was more believable than the truth.

She walked through the main room to one of the isolation chambers designed to contain patients with the most heinous of communicable diseases like ebola or smallpox. She slid back the glass door and entered the hermetically-sealed room. Two gurneys were positioned side-by-side in the center. On top of each was a corpse. The one on the left belonged to a circus clown they had determined had no surviving relatives. On the right was Special Agent Cranston, whose SAC had volunteered him posthumously for this final assignment.

"Are you guys ready?" she asked, glancing up at the camera to her right. One had been placed in each corner of the room above massive amplifiers that stood nearly five feet tall.

"Whenever you are," her assistant's voice crackled through the intercom.

Lauren just wanted to get this over with. They all knew how this was going to end. Sure, she could have been sitting safely in the observation room with the others, but there was one key behavioral component they still needed to evaluate under controlled conditions, one which required someone to physically remain in the room. They needed to witness the spontaneous aggression. The cameras would digitally capture the swarming attack and plot the individual wasps to determine any sort of group patterns or individual dominance. Considering the fabric didn't feel thick enough to protect her from a stiff breeze, she wasn't surprised in the slightest that there had been no volunteers for the experiment, which commenced when she nodded her readiness.

"Starting at eight hertz."

Lauren watched both bodies, which had been stripped from the waist up. She focused on their abdomens, waiting for the first indication of movement beneath the skin. The sound was so low that she felt it as a vibration deep in her chest without hearing it.

All of the remains from the circus had been identified and cross-referenced against every federal database in hopes if discovering a motive for the attack. Other than a few outstanding warrants, some unpaid traffic tickets, and a surprising number of deadbeat fathers, there were no criminals of note. Several had served time for petty offenses from possession to larceny, but there were no connections to organized crime, foreign governments, or groups on any of Homeland Security's watch lists.

"Moving on to sixty-five hertz."

It produced a low, solid tone that reminded her of a stomach growling. She watched and waited, knowing full well that any second now she was going to come under siege by a swarm of killer wasps.

None of the victims had been related to prominent elected officials or celebrities in even the most peripheral way. None of them had been wealthy by anyone's definition, nor had any of them been party to any litigations or class action lawsuits. The demographic profile fit the standard rural American model. The ratio of Caucasians to minorities couldn't have been less remarkable. To all involved, the attack at the circus seemed to be the definition of random.

"Nine hundred thirteen hertz."

The sound reminded her of her childhood, of her mother humming while she fixed dinner.

The precision of the randomness suggested that someone had invested a great deal of thought into choosing the exact location for a controlled experiment, not unlike the one they were conducting at this very moment.

So far, they had yet to locate the man they had seen on the video recordings. His body wasn't among the remains in the room next door, nor were his face or fingerprints in any law enforcement databases. The circus' employment records listed the man as Dipak Patel, an animal handler of some renown, whose resume included stints at the San Diego Zoo and as an animal wrangler for several Hollywood films. They obviously hadn't followed up on his references, for none of them had heard of the enigmatic Mr. Patel. In fact, prior to his arrival at the circus, they could find no evidence that Dipak Patel even existed.

"Four-point-one kilohertz. How are you holding up in there, Dr. Allen?"

Lauren gave a thumbs-up. The sound became so shrill that it raised the hackles on the backs of her arms.

The timing of Patel's appearance and now disappearance was the most troubling part of the equation. Cranston had been right in his initial assessment. This was all too coincidental. The Super Bowl was set to kick off with a bang on Sunday night, in what was slated to be the last game ever to be played in the Georgia Dome before it was razed in favor of a more modern stadium. With over seventy-two thousand people in attendance and nearly twice that many pouring into the Atlanta area, among them foreign dignitaries from around the world, a well-coordinated strike could make the mass-casualty event at the circus pale by comparison. Add in the more than one hundred million viewers across the globe and it was an opportunity to make a statement the likes of which had never been made before. Even the President of the United States---a lifelong Detroit Lions fan---was scheduled to be a guest in the owner's box when his team took the field for its first appearance in the big game against the heavily favored Jacksonville Jaguars.

"Twelve kilohertz."

The high-pitched sound pierced her. She imagined it shattering wine glasses.

There was no way in the world that the game would be postponed or moved to a different venue, despite the insistent and repeated urgings of the FBI. The economic impact on the region was estimated to be as much as four hundred million dollars and there wasn't enough time to satisfactorily prepare another city to host such a grand event. Besides, there was the issue of saving face. Moving the game would be a tacit admission of fear by a country that could ill afford to expose a chink in its venerable armor. The Super Bowl was the ultimate expression of American ideals; an unparalleled spectacle of excess on an almost hedonistic scale. To allow the possibility of a strike to alter it in any way would be a betrayal of the American way and a demonstration of weakness that would open the door to the kind of terrorists who were waiting for just such an opportunity. Like every Super Bowl following 9-11, this year's game had been declared a National Special Security Event by the Department of Homeland Security and would be policed like a sovereign military state unto itself.

"Sixteen kilohertz. Anything at all yet?"

Lauren shook her head. The sound was so shrill it felt as though it originated from the center of her brain.

Regardless of the DHS's assurances and the countermeasures already in place, she had a bad feeling about this. Preventing someone from crashing a plane into the dome or sneaking explosives or weapons into the stadium was one thing, but how could they possibly detect wasp larvae that could easily be smuggled inside anyone in attendance? Hell, all someone would need to do is park within range and trigger the sound frequency to awaken the insects inside a dog in the back seat of a car or a mounted policeman's horse. There were too many variables outside of their control, and it didn't help that their mandate was to keep a lid on the slaughter at the circus until after the event. They were playing with fire and it seemed as though she was the only one willing to admit it. Theirs may have been the most powerful empire the planet had ever known, but its aura of invincibility was illusory.

"Twenty-two kilohertz. Here's where things get interesting."

The high-pitched sound was replaced by...nothing. They had passed into the supersonic range.

She heard a faint crinkling sound, like someone crumpling paper. She looked from one man's belly to the next. There was no sign of movement. Just pale skin mottled by flaccid blue veins and---

Wait.

There.

"Are you guys seeing this back there?"

"Nothing yet. What do you---?"

The man on the left erupted first. There was the merest ripple of skin, and then a tattered hole appeared and the air filled with wasps. The speed with which it transpired was staggering. She had seen it happen to the cocker spaniel with her own eyes, and yet she was still caught off-guard. She never even saw Cranston's abdomen tear open. God. She could hardly see anything through the sheer number of wasps swarming around her. They were all over her, crawling on her mesh mask, thrusting their stingers at her face, trying to sting her through the fabric. They were still juveniles, perhaps a third of the size of adult wasps and not yet fully developed, but no less terrifying. She stumbled forward, madly brushing them off. All she could see was the mass of seething bodies mere inches from her face that could kill her in a matter of seconds. The fabric felt too thin; their combined weight pressed it to her skin. A scream rose in her chest and burst past her lips, but the buzzing was so loud that she hardly heard it. She fell to her knees and swatted at the wasps on her veil. Carcasses crunched underneath her and she was certain that stingers prodded through the suit and into her knees. An all-consuming, blind panic took root. Screaming and thrashing, she tried to scurry away from them, but they were everywhere. All over her. Crawling under her hood, beneath her clothes, in her hair. She was certain of it.

She was going to die.

Lauren screamed and screamed until her throat was raw and she started to cough.

She opened her eyes and fought back the terror. The wasps were still everywhere, but they hadn't penetrated her defenses. There were no stingers in her skin. She was going to be all right. Slowly, she rose to her feet and brushed the wasps away from her eyes so she could see. Both of the corpses were crawling with them. Over and over, they stung the lifeless bodies and returned to the air, only to be replaced by a seemingly inexhaustible supply.

"Go ahead," she said.

"Are you okay in there for sure, Dr. Allen?"

She nodded and manipulated the chemical respirator under her face shield over her mouth. A fog descended from the ceiling and settled toward the floor. The shadowed forms of the insects were nearly invisible through the toxic cloud as they succumbed to the poison and dropped to the ground.

Their carcasses crackled underfoot like she was walking on bubble wrap as she studied the aftermath. There were so many of them that any effort to count them would be a waste of time they didn't have.

The buzzing sound diminished, and then ultimately ceased altogether.

The corpses were black with stingers. It was impossible to tell what they might have once looked like, or even what color their skin had been.

This was their worst fear realized.

How could they prevent an attack that could kill countless thousands when they couldn't see where the wasps were hiding or hear the sound that initiated their assault?