Something else bothered her about the situation, something she couldn’t quite pin down.
On the screen, two men wearing full bomb squad gear stepped away from the trailer door. Cranston paused only long enough to look at another agent and give a sharp nod. The agent pulled the door open and Cranston climbed up into the darkness, leading with his pistol. She heard shouts from the other agents, identifying themselves, warning anyone inside.
A burst of light that the aperture struggled to rationalize.
She saw a countertop. A rusted sink. Cupboards. An unmade bed. A dirty tabletop. The mirror on the closed bathroom door. The patterned linoleum floor. The view shifted quickly in time with Cranston’s stare as he tried to capture every detail at once. The trailer rocked as more men climbed inside.
“Open that door!” Cranston shouted.
He stepped back and Lauren stared down the length of his arms and the sightline of his pistol at his reflection on the bathroom door.
Whoever was responsible had created the perfect untraceable killing machines in the wasps. A bomb was beneath the skills of someone who could play God with the genes of half a dozen species.
“This isn’t right,” Lauren whispered.
The trailer was meant to be found, and there was only one reason she could think of as to why.
“Don’t open the door!” she screamed.
An agent drew the bathroom door open with a squeal. She watched, helpless, as Cranston stepped forward into the small room. There was a loud shriek of feedback from an alarm on the door. Everything was yellow plastic. The walls, the sink, the showerhead, the toilet. Everything except for the listless cocker spaniel sprawled on the floor in a crusted puddle of urine. Flies swirled around it, crawled on its eyes. Its fur was matted and clumped, its abdomen distended, its rectum prolapsed. It tried to raise its head, but dropped it heavily back to the ground.
“Oh, Christ,” Cranston said.
The dog whimpered and the fur on its flank ruffled as though blown by a sudden gust of wind.
“Out!” Cranston shouted. “Everyone out! Goddamn it! Everybody—!”
A feverish buzzing sound erupted with the cloud of wasps that boiled out of the dog’s side. The tatters of skin flapped back like a baked potato. She saw the insects shooting straight toward the camera and then Cranston was in motion. An agent’s face, eyes wide with terror. A collision. Tumbling to the floor. Panicked cries. The incessant buzzing. The whine of feedback. Cranston crawling over another man’s body. He fell through the doorway and collapsed onto the ground. Shadows darted in and out of view, so close to the lens that it couldn’t clearly capture them. Legs running away from her.
A lone insect landed on the dirt in front of the lens. Its blurry shape was nearly a foot wide on her laptop screen. Its wings vibrated and its body twitched. And then it was gone, leaving only the droning buzz in its wake.
Bodies scattered across the parking lot.
Silence crackled from her speakers.
Lauren started to cry.
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.