"It is if it disrupts the life of the community."
"Jesus," Brannigan snorted, "you goddamn English." He'd flushed a darker brick red. "Like to think of yourselves as everybody's conscience, don't you, you and your prissy high-minded ways." He pointed a thick forefinger like the barrel of a gun. "Let me tell you, what Baz does is my affair, not yours, and don't forget it. Do you think I need you to tell me about my own son? You can go to hell!"
"That means you don't know," Nick said in the same quiet voice.
Brannigan's square jaw jutted. "Know about what?"
"Baz and his friends are on a big drug kick. They're eating them like jelly beans."
A pulse throbbed visibly in Brannigan's temple. His neck swelled. He swayed forward in his chair, a fist half-raised.
But it was Cheryl who said blankly, "The kids are on drugs? Nick, are you certain?"
Nick nodded without speaking, watching Brannigan.
"How many of the kids? All of them or just a few?" Cheryl said. She really wanted to come straight out and ask if Dan was one of them, but daren't. Had she been as stupid and blind as Tom Brannigan? If it was true it explained quite a lot that had been puzzling and worrying her about Dan. His attitude. His moods. His erratic behavior.
"I'm warning you, Power." Brannigan was trembling, his voice low and dangerous. "Don't you come making accusations about my boy. I see your game all right. You're out to cause trouble. Well I'm telling you here and now for the first and last time to keep your fucking nose--"
The door crashed open and Nick's wife stood wilting against the light. Her face was in silhouetted shadow, but they didn't need to see it to know that something was badly wrong. Cheryl felt the nausea churn in her stomach.
Nick was on his feet, staring at his wife. "What is it, Jen?"
Her voice sounded like an ancient gramophone record, indistinct and scratchy, periodically fading so that some of the words were lost. "It's Jo . . . please come, she's been . . . horrible and I can't believe . . . please come now. ... oh please . . ."
She would have fallen to the pine floor if Nick hadn't caught her in time.
22
The genetically adapted virus containing tetrachlorodibenzo-paradi-oxin, developed in the Zone 2 laboratories on Starbuck Island, had been spectacularly effective in contaminating the most densely populated areas of Africa, Asia, the subcontinent of India, China, and the Far East.
Burrowing its way into the gut of animals--from small rodents to man--the virus attacked the cellular structure of its host, causing cancer, disruption of blood-cell function, deformation of the liver and other organs, leading eventually and inevitably to death.
It was deployed via the water supply and thence by the contaminated hosts themselves, which passed it on to other animals and humans by means of direct contact, infected feces, and by the rotting corpses, each of which was a bacteriological factory in miniature. A single contaminated corpse, for instance, could wipe out a village or small town. It was the modern version of the Black Death, which swept Europe in the Middle Ages; only this time the plague was man-made, scientifically deployed, and a hundred times more virulent.
No one had been forewarned. No one--not politicians, scientists, business leaders, nor even military personnel--could be trusted not to reveal the existence of the Primary Plan before its inception, and therefore everyone without exception in the Designated Areas was included.
Contamination squads--specially trained units operating under orders from Advanced Strategic Projects--dumped canisters of the TCDD virus in streams, rivers and reservoirs. Only a few parts per million were required. Even had the authorities suspected that some form of toxic contaminant was being added to the water supply they would have needed highly sophisticated detection equipment, which they didn't have, to verify the fact. As it was they were in total ignorance that the covert operation had been mounted and put into effect.
The virus had been bred from various strains and was capable of retaining its effectiveness over a wide temperature range. Once ingested by the population it went immediately to work, and by C Day + 7 (one week after Contamination Day) had infected nearly 50 percent of those in the Designated Areas. By C Day + 12 the first deaths were reported, and thereafter the red line on the graph rose steeply to the vertical as millions perished in writhing agony.
Once begun, the process was self-perpetuating. The mounds of rotting corpses, left where they lay because there was no one to bury them, spread the contamination to the soil. Rainwater washed it into sewers, streams, and rivers. A black stain spread across continents, killing every form of animal life it encountered. The numbers of dead and dying went rapidly from hundreds of thousands to millions, to tens of millions, and then to hundreds of millions. Statistics were meaningless. Megadeaths became the standard term of measurement.
It was the Chinese who tried most desperately to find an answer. They managed to isolate the virus, but their centuries of experience in "natural" medicine were worse than useless when dealing with a chemical substance that hadn't existed until man invented it. They were vainly seeking an antidote to the most deadly poison on earth, and no such antidote existed.
Three weeks after C Day it was estimated that over one and a half billion people had died. This was still a long way short of the projected target of 4.3 billion, but it was an encouraging start. The poison would carry on doing its work because there was no way it could be stopped. Even the most remote regions with their own independent water supply weren't safe, thanks to cloud seeding: God's rain falling from the skies brought death in parts per million.
The scientists at Starbuck had warned that this technique should be used only as a backup to the main operation. Clouds were at the beck and call of winds, and winds were no respecters of national boundaries. A cloud bearing its deadly load of TCDD might cross an ocean and drip creeping black death on friend instead of foe--or, worse still, on the land of its perpetrators. Great care had to be taken to confine the cloud-borne contamination to specific geographical localities whose meteorological patterns and trade winds could be plotted with a high degree of certainty.
As the weeks went by and the death toll mounted and entire cities, regions, states, countries, and continents were progressively laid waste, the decaying carcasses were subjected to the gradual yet ineluctable processes of nature.
Still alive and thriving inside the cellular structure of the dead, the virus increased in concentration and began to infect the soil. Sewers became biological fermentation tanks. Rivers were log-jammed with sodden decomposing corpses that added their toxic load to the already bacteriologically fertile water. On the seaboards of every affected continent mighty rivers and small streams alike discharged their quota of chemical-bearing virus into the oceans.
The black stain spread from the landmasses and began to seep outward in ever-widening circles, carried by the mingling currents into every ocean of the world. In relation to the volume of water it was an exceedingly minute concentration. But it had been genetically adapted to survive in conditions that otherwise would have dissipated and destroyed it.
To the scientists at Starbuck, who had accomplished the task set them, their pride and jubilation was unclouded by any fears of what might happen now that the Primary Plan had been implemented and successfully concluded. They reasoned that the amount of TCDD in global terms was infinitesimal, hardly enough to be measured even with the most sensitive instruments.
Literally a drop in the ocean.
The film was all the more horrific because it was silent: mute dreamlike images of death.
Continuous movement and fast disjointed cutting engendered in the viewer the impression that this was the work of an insane director who'd abandoned the conventional techniques of moviemaking and instead pointed his camera randomly at bodies erupting with cancerous growths and babies decaying in gutters. As a horror film it was brilliant in its totally objective noninvolvement: a clinical record in lurid, disgusting Technicolor.