Its mandibles were much larger, sharper, and attached to more elaborate musculature than that of a standard wasp. They looked more like those of a termite, which were designed for chewing through hard wood, only proportionate to the wasp’s body size. There was no doubt they were easily strong enough to masticate mammalian tissue.
There were other bizarre mutations as well. Normal venom contains a toxin called melittin, plus various concentrations of apamine, hyaluronidase, phospholipases and phosphatases, and degranulating proteins. This particular species had only a fraction of the melittin in its venom sac, which meant that its vasoactive properties were markedly subdued. One sting wouldn’t cause the victim’s throat to swell shut, or produce hives, dizziness or loss of consciousness while the wasp laid its eggs. It would literally take dozens of stings to cause death to the average person without an acute allergy.
Their antennae were dramatically different as well. Instead of having a long distal portion called a flagellum, which was ordinarily composed of eight discrete sections that helped the wasp recognize different sounds, there was only a small nub, which, they could only assume, was able to identify a single tone.
They were dealing with a wasp that looked like a hybridization of a paper wasp and a digger wasp, had the ovipositor of a honey bee connected to the parthenogenic reproductive system of a parasitic wasp, with oddly short antennae attuned to a particular resonance of sound, the mandibles of a termite, and weaker venom than any single one of its constituent components. A finely-tuned machine capable of infesting a host without immediate detriment…and of killing an entire crowd of spectators in a matter of seconds.
This species wasn’t the result of random mutation or selective breeding. This was something that could only have been engineered in a lab.
But how had it gone from that lab into the belly of a circus elephant? And how long had they been growing in its digestive tract?
The elephant hadn’t been attacked by a swarm. It would have been killed like everything else under the big top. It had to have been stung repeatedly under controlled conditions for so many eggs to have hatched inside of it. The elephant’s sickly affect prior to its death had to have been caused by the mature insects that surely must have been crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in its bowels. It wouldn’t have been able to eat or defecate. The wasps had been causing it to slowly starve to death while they waited for the stimulus that triggered them to chew their way out of its gut.
Everyone at the fairgrounds last night had been killed by someone who had invested a tremendous amount of time and resources into the creation and release of the wasps. Not just killed, but murdered in a cold, calculating manner that had taken countless years of hard work in a laboratory far more advanced than even Lauren’s to plan and implement.
That was why they all now worked as fast and as diligently as they could.
They needed to figure out the motive behind using the wasps to murder hundreds of people at a circus in a town that barely warranted inclusion on the map.
Everything hinged upon it.
They needed to know why.
II
Lauren checked in with Special Agent Cranston just before noon and relayed her findings. He sounded less surprised than she had expected. His team had already identified the majority of the faceless decedents based primarily on the driver’s licenses they found in the purses and wallets either on or near the remains. They were in the process of crosschecking the names against employment records in hopes of stumbling upon a motive while simultaneously bagging and tagging the corpses. CDC transport vehicles were running back and forth, hauling the bodies by the truckload to their quarantine station downstairs near the construction zone. Lauren imagined them stacked like corded wood against the rear wall in the warehouse-size chamber, in the space they had cleared by moving all of the stretchers out of the curtained partitions. Cranston had promised to sic his best dogs on the genetically engineered angle to determine which facilities were capable of pulling off something this ambitious.
In the meantime, she needed to scrutinize the samples. If the wasps had developed inside of the elephant, then it was definitely possible that they were growing inside of the hundreds of corpses they were unloading at this very moment. The last thing they wanted was their entire quarantine room swarming with wasps. And yet, at the same time, they did need to focus on the lifecycle of the insects, which undoubtedly meant they needed an experimental cross-section to hatch.
She shuddered at the thought of willingly allowing one of the corpses to become infested and torn apart on her table while she leaned over it in a beekeeper’s suit.
Right now, a team of medical examiners was autopsying every tenth body. Thus far, the results were all the same. Their deaths were the result of the sheer amount of venom that hit the victims’ bloodstreams at once, leading to anaphylactic shock. Their windpipes had closed due to the natural histamine reactions of their immune systems. In essence, they had all asphyxiated as one.
Blood was the key. It pumped through a complex highway of vessels that connected the heart to every organ, from arteries to arterioles and finally into the tiny capillaries that ran just beneath the surface of the skin and back again through venules and veins. This was the route that nearly every pathogenic microbe used to reach its ultimate destination inside the body. Airborne viruses accessed it through the mucus membranes in the respiratory tract and directly through the lungs. For other diseases, all it took was a simple transfer of fluids, or, in some cases, just the slightest physical contact or a passing of germs via a fomite like a doorknob. In this case, she suspected the wasps laid their eggs subcutaneously, and upon hatching, the larvae traveled through the blood into the digestive system where there was room to grow in the nutrient-rich maze of hollow tubes, in much the same fashion as tapeworms.
She studied the blood samples through an electron microscope on slides her lab assistants had prepared. Whole blood had been treated with heparin to prevent coagulation, while other samples had been centrifuged, which broke them down into their individual components. The skin and superficial samples of the human remains had all reflected what one would expect from a wasp sting. Nothing more, nothing less. The elephant’s bowels had also been relatively normal, minus the sections where the ovipositors had become impaled in the lining. The mucosa had been dramatically inflamed in the immediate vicinity of the stingers, but there was no sign of infection or other physiological reaction, which suggested that the wasps had merely been content to develop inside of the animal until the external stimulus triggered the instinct that caused them to chew their way out. Eventually, the elephant would have starved to death, had it not been gutted from within first.
The sample of blood she now studied under 1000x magnification was from the man she had encountered on the lawn outside the fairgrounds, the bald man who’d been designated Number One by the pink flag near his head. He had presumably been nearest the exit flaps of the big top when everything had started to happen and made a break for it. He hadn’t even made it a hundred yards. His blood was fairly common, which made him a good test subject. O positive. Clear toxicology screen, minus the preponderance of melittin. Standard increase in white blood cells to combat the sudden onslaught. Normal red blood cell and platelet counts. The only thing they found that shouldn’t have been there were the small white ovals that vaguely resembled the platelets, only they were about a hundred times larger and less prevalent by a factor of ten thousand. Extrapolating the sample size to that of the entire bloodstream still intimated that there were hundreds of thousands of what she assumed to be egg sacs floating through the host.