the Devil's Workshop (1999) Page 9

  "Oh, why don't you quit yer damn complaining," Sid growled uncharacteristically, startling both Mary and Stacy.

  "All morning you've been sullen and mean," Mary said. "What on earth is the matter with you, Sid?"

  "I'll be right back," Stacy said, wanting to avoid this strange domestic quarrel. As she turned away to get their iced tea, she heard Mary say, "Don't glare at me like that!" Then Stacy heard a commotion behind her at the Saunders table. She turned and saw Sid scramble unexpectedly to his feet. He was glaring angrily at his wife.

  "What is it?" Mary demanded.

  "God damn you!" he shouted.

  "I beg your pardon?" Mary Saunders said.

  Now everybody in the restaurant fell quiet and looked at the round-faced dentist, who was cursing at his wife in public for no apparent reason. His face was suddenly contorted, his complexion pumped with blood.

  "You hush up, Sidney," Mary hissed. "Sit back down and behave. What's gotten into you?"

  "Fuck you!" he screamed in rage. Then he reached down and picked up a serrated steak knife from a basket on the console. Without saying another word, he lunged at his wife and plunged the knife deep into her chest. Mary Saunders let out a gasp as the knife was slammed into her up to the handle. Blood, thick as motor oil, oozed down her white silk blouse and pooled in her lap. Then she began to scream as her husband turned and bolted from the coffee shop amid the startled shouts of the other patrons.

  Stacy had momentarily frozen, but now reached out for the old woman, who was still seated upright in the booth, looking down at the knife in her chest in horror and disbelief. Then Mary went into her first death spasm. Her whole body jerked uncontrollably, her right hand banged hard against the table. The blade had pierced her heart, and Stacy knew that the convulsions signaled oxygen starvation in the cerebral cortex. The old woman spasmed several more times as Stacy held her, trying to give her comfort. Then Mary Saunders let out a long sigh and fell sideways onto the upholstered couch.

  Stacy reached out and felt for a heartbeat, but Mrs. Saunders was dead.

  Sid was standing in the middle of the street between the restaurant and the dock. His teeth were bared. He was still yelling obscenities. Two soldiers had chased him out of the restaurant. They stood on the porch of the Bucket a' Bait, looking with alarm at the growling, snarling dentist in the center of the street.

  "Let's go. Let's take him. He's just an old guy," the tall Army Corporal said. "You go right, I'll go left."

  They separated and moved off the porch, toward Dr. Saunders. It was then that the old man charged. He attacked with such fury that both twenty-year-olds could not restrain him. He clawed at them. His teeth snapped savagely as they tried to tackle him.

  Two other soldiers from their table could see through the window what was happening outside. They got up and followed their buddies onto the porch. They watched in disbelief as the old dentist seemed to actually be overpowering two men one-third his age. The rage and adrenaline that drove him were, in that moment, too much for them. The two remaining soldiers bolted into the street. It took all four of them to finally subdue Sid Saunders.

  They tied his hands behind his back, using their belts. Then they dragged him, screaming and cursing, into the restaurant. Barney suggested they put him in the empty food locker out back. It was a sturdy, windowless room with a padlock. They shut the door and snapped the latch. They could still hear him shouting incoherently after the door was closed.

  "What the fuck was that all about?" Barney said, his voice a whisper of shock and dismay.

  Nobody answered.

  Stacy Richardson had a theory. Only Charles Lack knew exactly what had just happened.

  "We got an event over here," Dr. Lack said to Dexter DeMille over the telephone from inside the restaurant. "I think... I think..."

  "You think what?" Dr. DeMille snapped impatiently. He was in his lab in Building Six at Vanishing Lake Prison.

  "We've got a problem. A guy at the restaurant just went nuts and killed his wife." Dr. Lack lowered his voice. "He behaved exactly like the test case yesterday."

  "That's impossible," Dexter DeMille shouted. "How could that be?"

  "Obviously, some of your damn mosquitoes got loose," Dr.

  Lack hissed. "I told you that it was a mistake. We should never have used an aerobiological vector."

  "Let's not go into that now," Dexter said. "Stay there, I'm on my way," and he hung up.

  The bio-hazard team from the prison roared into town fifteen minutes later. Dr. DeMille was the first one out of the windowless van. He moved into the restaurant with his medical bag, followed by three M. P. S. Barney unlocked and cautiously opened the door to the food locker. Stacy Richardson moved to where she could see into the room over their shoulders.

  Dr. Sidney Saunders was now kneeling on the floor leaning against the sidewall. His hands were still tied behind him. The rage was no longer in his eyes. Instead, there was a look of desperate confusion. He tried to stand as they entered, but staggered, and like Troy Lee, fell over, going down on his right side. He had lost his equilibrium; drool was streaming down his chin.

  "Look for a labrum injection mark," Dr. DeMille said to Dr. Lack, referring to a mosquito bite, knowing the scientific language would elude the civilian restaurant patrons. "See if you can isolate it. We can do a tracking scan later," DeMille finished.

  They were working feverishly, pulling Sid Saunders's shirt off, checking around his hairline.

  "Here," Dr. Lack said, and pointed to a mosquito bite on the back of the dying man's neck.

  "Get him in the van," DeMille said. "Forget bio-containment. We've gotta move fast."

  "What's going on here?" Barney said again. "Does this have something to do with yer experiments over at the prison?" But Drs. Lack and DeMille were already following the uniformed M. P. S, who had picked up the dying sixty-year-old dentist and were carrying him out of the restaurant. They put him in the back of the truck. The M. P. S pushed Barney away from the van and slammed the back door before scrambling in and roaring away.

  Mary Saunders still lay dead in the booth at table two. Only after the van left did Barney make calls to the County Coroner and Sheriff, which were fifty miles away in Bracketville, a town with only a two-man substation. The Sheriff said they would get up there as soon as possible, and suggested that Barney take Mary over to the big walk-in fish cooler on the dock and put her there until the County people showed up.

  Stacy Richardson slipped out of the restaurant in the confusion and moved up the hill to a little two-room wood cottage in the back that Barney sometimes rented to employees. She noticed absent-mindedly that the two hobos had finished their cleanup, but had left without waiting to get paid or fed. She assumed that, like homeless people everywhere, they were sensitive to their vulnerability and had fled during all the frenzied activity.

  Stacy took out a key, opened the door, and moved into her cluttered cottage. She went directly to her small desk and pulled a binder down off the shelf, which read:

  PRIONS

  She opened it to a section she had labeled:

  SYMPTOMS AND DISEASE

  Then she turned the binder to a fresh page and wrote:

  "Dr. Sidney Saunders, DDS."

  "Near death at 10:30--07/16/99. Condition appears to be neuro-related."

  Below that she wrote: "The death resembles no condition before observed. Probable iatrogenic infection, homicidal rage, followed by status epilepticus. Mosquito vector." Then she wrote a detailed medical account of Sid Saunders's bizarre homicidal pre-death behavior.

  Also pasted in the binder were several long-lens photos of Charles Lack and Dexter DeMille, along with both men's scientific histories. Under Dr. DeMille's bio, Stacy wrote the new information Dr. Lack had provided: "DeMille is unstable, dissociative, and suicidal." Yet it was stable, fun-loving, nonsuicidal Max who had supposedly stuck a twelve-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 10

  DAM
AGE CONTROL

  They were seated in the old parole board hearing room in the big, rectangular pale brick administration building. Out the windows across the yard they could see the high tower that contained the gas chamber in center block.

  Admiral James G. Zoll was seated with his back to the windows that streamed sunlight past him and lit the unhappy faces of Dexter DeMille, Charles Lack, and Colonel Laurence Chittick. Seated at the end of the room, with his back to a large map of Vanishing Lake, was Captain Nicholas Zingo. He and his "Torn Victor" Delta Force Rangers were assigned to Admiral Zoll for program security and had arrived with the Admiral and Colonel Chittick half an hour ago from Fort Detrick, in three unmarked Blackhawk helicopters.

  Captain Zingo was a muscular thirty-year-old, who Dexter DeMille feared would be ordered one day to kill him. Torn Victor was a unit combat designation and included ten event-trained Delta Force Rangers, who immediately upon arriving had commandeered the available jeeps and two half-tracks at the prison, then quickly deployed them around Vanishing Lake. Captain Zingo had an earpiece attached to a belt radio and was monitoring his deploying Rangers through his headset, while at the same time listening to what was going on in the briefing room.

  "I assume it's your cocktail that caused this?" Admiral Zoll asked Dr. DeMille, his sandpapery voice filling the room and raising the hair on the back of Dexter's neck.

  "Before we know that for sure," Dexter said, "we'll need to do a brain slice and examine the tissue under an electron microscope at forty-seven thousand power to see if unusual amounts of amyloid plaque are present in the cells and if--"

  "Cut the shit, Doctor," Admiral Zoll interrupted. "I don't need a buncha nano-chat. Is it our stuff that caused this or not?"

  Dexter couldn't bring himself to answer. He looked around the room and his eyes accidentally caught Dr. Lack's.

  "It's us, Admiral," Charles Lack said, as if invited in by Dexter's helpless look.

  Admiral Zoll got to his feet and walked around the table slowly. He moved over to the map. "How did the goddamn mosquitoes get out?" he asked, and when Dexter hesitated again, Charles Lack answered.

  "We did a colored smoke test an hour ago. There's a leak in one of the vents. It appears that there were bad exhaust seals in the old gas vents that were never properly addressed."

  "Why didn't we do a smoke test before we put those two grunts in there?" Admiral Zoll asked softly.

  "Good question, sir," Charles Lack said. Then he looked to Dexter as if he should suddenly have the answer.

  Dexter had no answer. It was a mistake, and the Crazy Ace was not a man you confided your mistakes to.

  Dexter was beginning to slide into one of his deep depressions. The room seemed to be getting smaller. It was almost as if the walls were closing in. Even his breath was coming faster; his heart was slamming so uncontrollably in his chest that he was alarmed he might actually have a coronary.

  "Okay, forget it," Zoll snapped. "We got the problem now, either way. What I need is a varsity play from the deck," he said, using an old aircraft carrier expression. "I want full containment on that little town over there. Nobody leaves. How many people live there?"

  "A few hundred or so," Dr. Lack said.

  "I also want the phone system shut down. We need to impose a total information blackout. If any word of this slips out, this whole program goes back to the taxpayers and all of us are gonna be up on the Hill trying to find a way to explain it." They were all quiet, but everyone knew if this got out, they wouldn't be going to Capitol Hill, they would be going to Leavenworth. "First priority is containment, then we need to make sure we kill all of the escaped mosquitoes," Zoll continued.

  Captain Zingo got out of his chair and moved over to the map. "We have ultra-sensitive directional microphones set to the exact high frequency female mosquitoes make when they fly. They've been tested on mosquito vectors before, so they're accurate, and efficient. My men are checking the marshy areas around the lake to see if we can determine where they're breeding."

  "What makes you say they're breeding?" Dexter asked. "They're sterilized females. They can't breed."

  Dr. Lack got to his feet. "Not to disagree, Dex, but apparently they weren't sterilized properly."

  "The hell they weren't," Dexter snapped. "I did it myself."

  "After this happened, I took some unhatched larvae out of your lab and hatched them. You have unsterilized females, and, I regret to say, I also found quite a few functioning males."

  "That's impossible!" Dexter exclaimed. But he was now beginning to suspect that Dr. Lack had been sabotaging the mosquito experiment. "Those insects and the larvae were hit with huge x-ray exposures. There's no way they could reproduce."

  "Well, one way or another, that's what they did," Charles Lack said, his face grim. He had chosen this moment, with Admiral Zoll present, to destroy Dexter DeMille.

  "If they're breeding," Captain Zingo said, "we've got an even bigger problem. We need to find the places where they're nesting on the lake, and get in there immediately with either insecticides or defoliants. I think we should set fire to the marsh areas and burn them. That way we'll get the unhatched larvae."

  There was a cold, angry silence in the room. Finally, Captain Zingo spoke again. "I have half my team working the high-frequency mikes, looking for breeding areas. The other half are doing phone and field containment."

  "Mosquitoes swarm at sunset," Dr. Lack said. "I think we need to hit them before that."

  "Okay," Captain Zingo said, looking at his watch, "that gives us two hours." Then he turned back to the map. "As far as civilian containment, we deployed our people here and here," he said, pointing to the two roads that surrounded the lake. "I've got the Angel Track parked across the main road leading up here," he said, referring to a half-track ambulance that could travel off-road on treads. "We're going about two miles down the highway and cutting some lumber so the trees will fall across the road. We'll put a two-man team there and turn all traffic around, but this probably buys us less than a day. Then the county cops are gonna chopper in here."

  "What about phones?" Admiral Zoll asked.

  "We're working on that." Captain Zingo had a shoulder mike, which he now clicked on and spoke into: "This is Zippo-i to Zulu Field Command. Gimme a communications update." He listened for a minute through his earpiece, then triggered the mike again. "Okay, roger that. Stand by." He looked at Admiral Zoll. "We've just shut down the main cellphone pod on this hill, here"--he pointed to a low hill on the west side of Vanishing Lake--"and we've located the main telephone junction box. It's off Highway 16. They're in the process of disabling it."

  "Anything else?"

  "One of our scout teams said they just learned there's some kind of hobo camp up by the rail line, to the east. Soon as they can, they'll go up there and secure those people."

  Dexter DeMille straightened up abruptly when he heard that. Fannon Kincaid was a delusional, heavily armed fanatic. He doubted that two men in a jeep would have much luck securing one of God's four revolutionary angels.

  Stacy and most of the other residents of Vanishing Lake Village had heard the three Blackhawks coming up the canyon, heard the heavy whomp-whomp-whomp of the rotors as they reverberated against the hills and mesas. Ten or twelve townspeople came out, stood on the wharf, and watched through binoculars as the combat helicopters landed a mile away on the baseball diamond, which the soldiers had cleared on the far side of the prison.

  "What the hell are those people up to?" Barney said, a nervous sense of impending doom gripping him.

  They were all trying to comprehend the bizarre events of that afternoon. Stacy stood on the edge of the dock, looking across the lake at the unmarked choppers through her camera's telephoto long lens. She snapped a few shots as they landed and tried to decide what she should do next. She had little doubt that they were in the middle of some kind of aerobiologic outbreak that was mosquito-borne. She wondered if all of the people in Vanishing Lake would end up dying, fo
llowing the same horrible homicidal paths set by poor Sid and Mary Saunders. She suspected that the strange neural encephalitis that had claimed Sid was a Prion very much like the rare New Guinea disease Kuru, discovered in the early seventies by Carleton Gajdusek and Dexter DeMille. Max had told her that Kuru was caused by a rogue protein that, when ingested or injected, wasn't broken down by the body's enzymes, as all other such proteins were. The Prion eventually went to the brain, where it attacked the mood center, eating holes, turning the midbrain to jelly, causing a condition called spongiform encephalitis. If Dr. DeMille had developed some juiced-up strain of Kuru, it could constitute the worst strategic weapon ever conceived. She also knew if mosquitoes were the vector, and if they were breeding, it might be only a matter of hours before more people went berserk.

  One other thing that Max had included in his e-mail had been rattling around in her head. He had said that what made a protein bio-weapon so dangerous was that it adapted to the target victim's own body chemistry. It didn't cause an infection or swelling, like a virus, so it often went undiagnosed. It became, in effect, a stealth weapon that silently and efficiently attacked your brain. Your immune system would not even be aware that it had infiltrated your body. It could therefore spread quickly, with the body producing no anti-toxins to fight it.

  Twenty minutes later the first jeep full of bio-garmented soldiers appeared in the sleepy fishing village. The troops drove slowly down the street. One of the soldiers in the back of the jeep was holding a very scientific-looking long-nosed directional mike.

  "What happened to Sid? Is he dead?" Barney asked the driver of the jeep when it slowed at the town's only intersection.

  "Go inside, sir. We'll take care of it," the soldier said.

  Stacy was standing nearby, and she saw a cold menacing look in the three soldiers' eyes. It was a look of complete disregard for all of them. Stacy knew as the jeep pulled away that this was going to escalate. She knew that if she was going to remain viable, she had to get out of Vanishing Lake Village immediately.