Another cut and they were in a different section of the grounds. This time, Lauren could only assume, the woman held the camcorder while presumably the father piggybacked the boy, who clung to the man’s forehead as though his life depended upon it. The man pointed off to his right and the lens followed. A pen had been cordoned off in a broad section of dirt. The sign on the fence promised camel rides for five dollars. A grungy man with a scraggly beard guided the camel in a circle by its reigns, much to the delight of the twin girls perched between its fur-capped humps.
The camera swung again to the right and zoomed in on another enclosure where several men raked hay into piles for the elephant troupe. One of the pachyderms thrust its trunk into the mound, gave it a twirl, and lifted a clump to its mouth. Another man appeared with a hose and sprayed down the smaller elephants in the rear. Flies buzzed around them, causing the enormous animals to flap their ears. Heaps of dung led all the way back to where a fourth elephant rested listlessly on its side. Two more men, who had obviously fallen in the mud several times, pushed and shoved at the behemoth in an effort to force it back to its feet. It didn’t even appear capable of standing.
Lauren had a pretty good hunch as to why.
A small crowd had gathered off to the side to watch, among them a couple of teenagers smoking and passing back and forth a water bottle that made them wince with each swig of the spiked concoction, an elderly man with an ornate cane that appeared too short to be of any real use, and a visibly pregnant woman with coffee-colored skin who wore her raven-black hair in a ponytail and an expression of abject horror on her face.
Past the elephant’s rear haunches, a man of Middle Eastern descent stood stock-still, staring down at the animal, his features devoid of emotion. He wore a faded ball cap low over his hooded eyes and what looked like a cattle prod in a sheath on one hip and a transceiver holstered on the other.
One of the men who had been trying to make the sick elephant stand rushed up to him, gesticulating wildly with his hands. The man with the ball cap glanced over at the spectators, his gaze lingering on one of them for a long moment, and then ushered the agitated handler toward an unmarked mobile trailer.
The recording darkened. A sudden flash forced the aperture to rectify its focus. The center ring was spread out below, partially obscured by the heads of the people in the row below the cameraman. The ringmaster stepped into the spotlight, but the camera panned left and focused on the young boy’s face. He sat in his mother’s lap, eyes bright, mouth open wide in wonder.
Cut to clowns piling out of a miniature car. Acrobats flipping and twirling from the high-wires. A lion tamer goading his maned charge with a whip and a chair. A tiger leaping through a ring of fire. A parade of elephants circling the ring.
There was a high-pitched squeal that degenerated into feedback.
The view snapped suddenly to the left. In the foreground, the young boy pressed his small hands to the sides of his head. Above his head, the camera focused on a bank of speakers mounted to the tent supports, then whipped back toward the ring, flashing past faces that had all turned toward the sound, hands clapped over their ears.
One of the elephants wobbled and fell. Several trainers raced to its side.
The field of view panned across the chaos. Clowns and other performers walked slowly into the center of the ring from where they’d been watching from the shadows, uncertain of exactly what was transpiring, but prepared to do whatever it took to keep the show going.
A shadowed figure hurried past the clowns toward the lone exit. It passed under the spotlight just long enough for Lauren to recognize the man with the cattle prod from the elephant pen.
The camera jerked back to where the ringmaster called for the audience’s attention. Clowns cavorted around him and trapeze artists hurriedly scaled the posts toward their perches.
Abruptly, the squealing sound ceased.
The ringmaster smiled and laughed as though it were all part of the show.
Two men ran over and grabbed him by the jacket. The same men who had been tending to the lame elephant.
Screams erupted from everywhere at once.
The camera jerked to the left in time to capture a shot of what looked like static boiling out of the elephant’s gut. Black dots expanded into a cloud, and the people in the row in front of the camera jumped up from their seats, eclipsing the view. Bodies hurtled past. Footsteps thundered on the bleachers. The screams grew louder and louder until they reached an awful crescendo that overwhelmed the recorder’s microphone.
There was a loud clattering sound as the camera fell to the man’s feet.
A dark, slender shape with spindly legs and a twitchy abdomen crawled across the lens.
The screams went on for what felt like an eternity before dissolving into a crackling buzz.
The aperture focused in and out on the blurry insect and the hand dangling from the bleachers beyond it.
After several moments, another high-pitched squeal sounded. Muffled this time, as though coming from far away.
The wasp flew away from the lens.
A buzzing drone faded until only the squawk of feedback remained.
And then there was only silence.
IV
“Jesus,” Cranston whispered.
Lauren echoed his sentiment. That was the most horrible thing she had ever seen. So many people in pain, so many dying in the worst possible manner.
Cranston looked at each of them in turn.
“I need to know what the hell those things were, how they got into that elephant, and why they attacked like that. I want to know where they went. I need to put a name to every single one of those bodies. And I need to know what in the name of God was in those stingers.” He spun a slow circle. All eyes were on him. “What are you waiting for?”
The group spurred to life at once.
Lauren turned and headed back toward the tent. She was already making a mental checklist in her head. She needed tissue and blood samples from the elephant, a cross-section from several different corpses—
“Hey, doc!” Cranston called after her.
He jogged to catch up with her, took her by the elbow, and spoke softly so that only she could hear.
“I don’t have to tell you that time is a critical factor here. With what’s lined up in Atlanta, we need this resolved as quickly and quietly as possible.” He paused. “I really don’t like the timing of this.”
Lauren nodded.
Cranston searched her eyes for a long moment, nodded back, and then turned away to rejoin the others.
She hurried into the tent and began the slow, arduous task of cutting tissue from various points along the elephant’s digestive tract, from its tongue all the way through to its rectum. By the time she finished, she’d found four more intact wasp carcasses, minus their stingers, which she could only assume were embedded somewhere in the mucosal lining. She aspirated milky fluid from the boils on several of the human corpses, took samples of blood and cerebrospinal fluid, and collected more stingers and the striated skin around them. The medical examiner would perform a thorough examination of the remains to provide a conclusive mechanism of death. Right now, Lauren just needed to make sure there were no virulent microorganisms or otherwise contagious agents in the stingers. From there, she could move on to toxins and allergens, and determine if an immediate injection of antihistamines or steroids would counteract the life-threatening effects.
Her thoughts drifted back to the video recording. The wasps had chewed their way out of the animal’s bowels as she had suspected, but there were several things she had noticed that didn’t quite make sense. First, there was the high-pitched tone that had come from the speakers. It hadn’t been feedback. The sound had been too regular, unwavering. It not only appeared to have surprised the audience, but the performers as well. And it was shortly thereafter that the wasps had emerged from the elephant’s abdomen. Was it possible that the two were somehow related? Then there was the second occurrence after everyone was already dead, softer, as though attenuated by distance. That had been when all of the insects had flown away, hadn’t it? And what about the mystery man? He had to be someone with a measure of authority within the carnival. The elephant handler had approached him as though he were in charge. And then in the middle of the chaos, while all of the performers had been converging in the center ring, he’d been moving in the opposite direction in a big hurry.