They walked out from between the bleachers and Lauren gasped at the scope of the slaughter. The stadium seats were nearly filled to capacity. There had to be easily four hundred people collapsed on the metal slopes. Tangled in the aisles. Lying on top of one another. Clumped in mounds. She saw parents who had tried to shield their children with their bodies, elderly couples who had been trampled in the momentary stampede, baby carriages and wheelchairs, still occupied. These people had seen death coming, but had been unable to move fast enough to escape. Agents and officers in their isolation gear threaded through the masses, taking pictures and gathering whatever evidence they could find.
“From what I’ve seen,” Lauren said, “there are no outward signs of contagion, viral or bacterial. It doesn’t look like there was even enough time for anything to pass between them. That doesn’t necessarily rule out an infectious agent, though. If there’s anything in the samples, we’ll find it.”
“Then that ought to make your job here pretty easy.”
He glanced over at her. His mask stretched over a smile. There was obviously something he wasn’t telling her.
Cranston led her past the congregation of suits, whose voices lowered when she neared, and to the center of the ring. She recognized the massive bucket-shaped platforms the elephants used to rise to their full height and the man with the whip who encouraged them to do so. The tough, leathery hide had protected the elephants from the worst of the assault, yet their skin still bubbled with what looked like gray boils.
“We know the cause of death was the sheer number of bee stings to the head and face,” Cranston said. “We just don’t understand why they attacked like they did, why their stings were so toxic, or where they came from.”
One of the elephants was in much worse shape than the others. A gaping wound framed its abdomen, fringed by tatters of gray hide, viscera spilled out all over the ground. The bowels were thoroughly destroyed, torn apart.
Lauren could only stare at the mess. This was why she was here. Suddenly, she realized that she wouldn’t be going home anytime soon.
“I can tell you where they came from.” She pointed at the mess of entrails. “They chewed their way out of their host. A better question would be…where are they now?”
II
“Bees living in an elephant’s guts?” Cranston scoffed. “I don’t buy that for a second.”
“The evidence is right here at your feet,” Lauren said. She knelt over the viscera, removed a long pair of blunt forceps from her case, and tugged at the frayed mesentery. “Look at the edges. These aren’t clean incisions, nor are they ragged tears. You see how they almost appear serrated? That was caused by mastication. Think about how many insects it must have taken to kill this many people so quickly. There had to be hundreds of thousands of them, maybe millions. They didn’t just swarm in here through the tent flaps. I may not be an expert on bees, but I can’t imagine them behaving like that. No. That many individuals? They had to be brought here in some sort of vessel. And I think that’s exactly what we’re looking at here.”
“Your theory doesn’t stand to reason. How in the world do you propose someone was able to make a two-ton pachyderm swallow millions of bees? How would they survive inside of it?”
“That’s my job to figure out.” She glanced up at Cranston. “Have you already photographed this elephant?”
“Yeah…why?”
Lauren removed a scalpel from her briefcase and slit open a length of the small bowel like she was gutting a snake. The inner mucosa was wrinkled and slimy, and dotted with brownish chyme. She sifted through the sludge until she found what she was looking for, pinched it with the forceps, and extricated it from the ileum.
“What is it?” Cranston asked.
She held up the forceps so he could see the small insect. It had curled in upon itself, the nub where its stinger had been tucked over the top of its head. Its long, slender wings iridesced with orange under the spotlight. Its body was jet black with rings such a deep shade of crimson they were nearly indistinguishable. A diminutive orange petiole articulated the tiny thorax with an abdomen that hooked under like a scorpion’s tail in reverse. It had a triangular-shaped head with mandibles that looked like those of an ant on a much grander scale.
This was no bee.
Its body was more reminiscent of that of a wasp, sleek and dangerous, but wasps didn’t lose their stingers like bees, and bees were hairy to facilitate the collection of pollen.
She slid the carcass into a collection bag and passed it to Cranston, who held it close to his face to study it.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “When a bee loses its stinger, it dies shortly thereafter, right? This one lost its stinger and died inside the elephant. So where are all of their bodies? They should be everywhere.”
Lauren rose and snatched the bag back from him.
“They have to be somewhere around here. We just haven’t found them yet. While you’re looking, I’m going to see if I can figure out which species this might be, and how it ended up in the digestive tract of this animal.”
She had a hunch, but she wasn’t ready to share it. Not yet, anyway. Not until she knew for sure. And if she was right….
“Hey!” one of the gowned men called from the bleachers. He held a black rectangular object over his head. “Look what I found! And it’s still recording!”
He clambered over the bodies and descended to the leveled dirt. Cranston hurried over to meet him. Lauren followed. They were joined by the group of agents in short measure.
Cranston took the camcorder from the forensics tech and turned it over and over in his hands.
Lauren heard it softly whir as it continued to record.
The Special Agent opened the three-inch side-flap view screen, then looked back at the tech.
“See if you can find any more of these.” He pressed the STOP button and the red light over the lens darkened. He turned to face the rest of them. “Are you guys ready to do this?”
III
Cranston led them out of the big top and into the wash of light where at least the breeze circulated the stench. Lauren breathed a sigh of relief. She had begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable under the blank stares of the dead that packed the bleachers. Consciously, she knew they weren’t actually watching her, but that didn’t alleviate the crawling sensation on her skin. She didn’t suppose the fact that they had all been killed by some sort of wasp helped in that regard either.
The other agents closed rank around Cranston, forcing Lauren to stand on her toes to see between them.
Cranston rewound the recording to the start and pressed PLAY.
The shaky footage began with a close-up of a woman holding a toddler on her hip. The young boy bared a big grin for the camera. Behind them, Lauren saw the ticket booth down the hill through the grove of trees. They were standing at the edge of the parking lot while scores of people who had no idea what fate had in store for them funneled past.
The sound was a continuous low rumble metered by the excited cries of children and the occasional feline roar.
Cut to a jostling view of the inside of the fairgrounds. The woman now held the child’s hand as they weaved through the crowd, passing games of chance stocked with stuffed animals bigger than the young boy, various attractions with greasy ticket collectors, and carts selling pretzels, snow cones, and glowing necklaces. The woman held up the child’s hand and helped him wave to the camera.