Theirs was a mission of reconnaissance, to establish the nature and severity of the threat. If they determined that they were dealing with a potential spillover event, then they were to create a firm perimeter and contain the situation until a team of CDC and UN scientists assembling in Nuremburg could be deployed. If they were instead faced with hostile opposition, they were to gather as much intel as they could while doing everything in their power to keep themselves alive.
Captain Trevor Richards remained in the lead and only occasionally dropped back far enough for Byrne to see him. The digital camouflage of his isolation suit made him nearly invisible and indistinguishable from the other men, were it not for the way he moved. He was sinewy and lithe, fluid in his movements, unlike First Lieutenant Chad Graves, whose broad shoulders and loping gait made him appear to move like a silverback through the brush. Private First Class Ryan Anthony remained closest to Byrne and served as his personal protector, quite obviously against his will. When his assignment had been handed down, the kid had looked like he was going to throw a tantrum. To his credit, he’d steeled his broad jaw, thrown out his chest, and saluted his commanding officer before turning his gray eyes upon Byrne and offering a curt nod. Corporal Elias Warren brought up the rear. He was easily a half-foot shorter than the rest of them and built more like a wide receiver than a linebacker, but he had an economy of movement that somehow lent him an air of danger, as though he were the personification of a trap perpetually prepared to spring.
In the grand scheme of things, Byrne supposed it didn’t matter in the slightest whether they liked or respected him as long as they did their jobs and kept him alive. Of course, when it came right down to it, that was undoubtedly how they must have viewed him, too.
The forest thinned, if only by degree. By the time he recognized the clearing through the trees, they were already upon it.
Richards lay on his stomach in the overgrowth beneath a cieba tree, scanning the clearing through the scope of his M27 IAR.
Anthony appeared as if by magic beside Byrne and pulled him to his knees.
Graves crouched beside them, staring down the slope of tall, wavering grasses toward where a town squatted in the darkness. The buildings were mere silhouettes, nearly indistinguishable from the night.
“Jesus,” Richards whispered.
Warren slid into the bushes beside Richards and sighted down his rifle.
“Someone must have come back for them,” he whispered. “Either that or our intel’s flawed.”
“What do you see?” Byrne asked.
“The bodies,” Richards whispered. “They’re gone.”
They walked in a diamond formation down the main road into Daru. The rising sun cast their shadows ahead of them. Anthony and Warren had scouted ahead and determined there wasn’t a single living organism within the settlement, which didn’t make any of them feel the slightest bit better about the situation. Richards took point and swept his rifle from one side of the deserted street to the other. Anthony and Warren stayed to either side of Byrne, covering the open doorways and windows of the two-story shacks, while Graves brought up the rear.
It reminded Byrne of the ghost towns of the American West, only rather than an air of mystery, an almost palpable shroud of suffering was draped over it.
Richards stopped and waved him forward. There was a dried spatter of blood on the dirt beside scuffmarks where it looked like a body had been dragged from the road.
“Do what you need to do,” Richards said. He removed his backpack, unzipped the main pouch, and extricated the case containing Byrne’s equipment, which he dropped unceremoniously to the ground. “And do it fast.”
Byrne knelt and opened his case. Inside were all of the tools he needed for the collection and testing of blood in the field. Ideally, samples would be taken directly from the source, but he had the skill to make this work. The blood was clotted and congealed with the dirt which, fortunately, was packed and hadn’t allowed the blood to soak very deep. He chiseled off the uppermost layer and scooped it into a plastic baggie.
“I need somewhere to set up.”
Richards locked eyes with Anthony and jerked his head toward the nearest storefront.
Anthony nodded and approached it in a shooter’s stance with his rifle seated against his shoulder. The front doors were little more than shutters that folded back to open the entire width of a shop, above which a hand-painted sign that read simply: 190 Kissy St. He broke the padlock with the butt of his rifle, fished it from the latch, and tossed it aside. Graves covered Anthony while the soldier cautiously drew the shutters open. Graves vanished into the darkness for nearly a full minute before emerging with his barrel lowered.
“All clear.”
Byrne glanced back to find Richards staring at him.
“What are you waiting for?”
Byrne closed the sample inside the case and headed toward the store. There were three rows of metal shelves, all stuffed to overflowing with a seemingly random assortment of goods. Vegetables rotted in wicker baskets beside open sacks of grain. Warm bottles of Coca-Cola were packed next to unlabeled bottles filled with liquids of various colors that looked homemade.
Anthony used his arm to clear some space, sending the wares crashing to the floor.
Byrne set his case on the shelf and carefully unloaded his supplies. The first thing he needed to do was separate the blood from the dirt by spinning it down in a centrifuge with an anticoagulant so he could run it through a gamut of tests and assays. He’d done this so many times he could do it in his sleep. His hands performed tasks he’d learned by rote while his mind tried to rationalize his situation.
He’d expected to find the bodies rotting in the streets. He couldn’t think of a single explanation for how such a large number could vanish in less than twenty-four hours. There were obvious marks indicating they’d been dragged away, but to where and for what reason? Scavengers picked at the remains where they lay. Predators moved their meals to a place where they could be consumed uninterrupted, but only did so with fresh kills, certainly not corpses potentially festering with disease.
The portable centrifuge whirred to a stop. He separated the blood from the heavier organic material and transferred it into several smaller wells. He drew up the blood from the first well and ran it through a First Antigen Rapid Test to evaluate for hemorrhagic diseases like Ebola while he set up the ELISA assay and the PCR machine. The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay measured the concentration of antibodies and evaluated for a wide variety of viral, bacterial, protozoan, and helminthic infections from Dengue fever and leprosy to malaria and Chagas disease. The polymerase chain reaction would allow him to isolate and identify any viral DNA from the human genome by running it alongside one of his control samples.
“What’s taking so long?” Richards asked.
“These tests take time,” Byrne said.
“Time’s a luxury we can’t afford, Doc,” Anthony said.
Byrne tuned them out. He loaded the genomic, viral, and plasmid templates into the wells in the Palm PCR instrument beside the blood sample and set it aside to work its magic. He placed the final blood sample onto a Polystyrene plate coated with an antibody solution, added an enzyme-conjugated antibody, and finally the substrate that would trigger the reaction and produce a measurable signal. He slid it to one side and used a pipette to transfer the PCR samples to the gel electrophoresis machine, which conducted an electrical charge across an agar medium to separate the prepared DNA segments by size, isolating the viral segment from the human and control samples.