Mitchell watched the commander walk back into the street and then stop.
Halfway to the van, the commander felt something strange. It was a flash of anger that just lasted a millisecond. He looked down and his fingers were curled up in claws.
What the hell was that? He wondered to himself. He guessed he was more pissed about not getting the guy than he realized.
As soon as he saw the man turn, Mitchell pulled away from the vent and swore at himself silently. Just because people couldn’t see him, he realized, didn’t mean they couldn’t smell him or be affected by whatever was going on. For a moment, the commander looked like he was going to hulk out in the middle of the street.
Mitchell wondered what would happen if the man had full-out freaked out. While Mitchell was nowhere to be seen, he feared that when that animal side of people took over, deeper senses were used. If dormant instincts involving scent and sound took hold, nothing would help him.
The commander’s hands relaxed and he felt his head clear.
23
Steve Baylor, PhD, looked out the eighth-floor window of his office located in an industrial park on the outer edge for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. His employer, Athena Biomedical, was ostensibly one of scores of satellite businesses that provided services to the agency that was the United States’ front line against infectious disease. The truth was a little bit murkier. The company was a de facto government agency unto itself. Created under a presidential order that had been renewed under the last three administrations, the purpose of its charter, the actual one kept inside a locked safe no one saw, was to take proactive measures against the creation and distribution of biological agents that may pose a threat to the citizens of the United States. Those proactive steps included everything from developing rapid vaccines outside the normal channels of government approval to recommending targets for predator drone strikes. As Baylor liked to described it, it was the medical equivalent of a SEAL team.
He was in the middle of typing his comments concerning a research paper on which he’d been asked to be an anonymous referee. Baylor had convinced himself the reason he was asking the journal to reject the paper wasn’t because he was co-author of a forthcoming paper dealing with a similar subject but because the evidence was lacking. Petty, perhaps, but when he controlled the largest off-the-books budget for biomedical research, he was entitled to some of the privileges that came with that. Besides, he told himself, if he spent less time dealing with the political side of science, he’d have more time to do actual research.
When he clicked send, one email in his flooded inbox caught his eye. It was from a mailing list with only a few dozen recipients, all of them involved in different agencies that dealt with biological and chemical warfare threats. The purpose of the list was to bring potential “patient zero” incidents to their attention. If a Pakistani man checked into the hospital after arriving at JFK with strange spots on his body that looked infectious or an elementary school in Chechnya came down with an extremely virulent form of the flu, these cases would be forwarded to the list if they had a friendly health worker on the scene. The CDC had official channels for those kinds of reports. This list was a back channel one.
It was the headline that grabbed his attention first. “Rigor mortis symptoms similar to Factor 9.”
Baylor opened up the email. An attachment contained several cell phone images of people who were killed earlier that day in a riot at a shopping mall in South Florida. There were close-ups of their hands and faces.
The peeled-back lips baring teeth like fangs and the hands curled into claws sent a chill down his spine. He’d seen lots of horrific imagery, on an almost daily basis; bodies didn’t concern him. He’d lost any fear of that after his first dissection. What worried him here was the familiarity of it all. He’d seen those expressions and the twisted cruel fingers before.
He read the rest of the email. It was sent by a doctor who was a first responder for the Department of Homeland Security. The responder thought the circumstances of the riot were unusual and the physical condition of the deceased worth passing on to the list. He didn’t know what Factor 9 was other than a few slides he’d been shown at a seminar on different things to look for in the field.
Factor 9 was a code word for the symptoms of a condition caused by what was known to only a few people as the Mongolian Flu.
But it couldn’t be that, thought Baylor. They made sure of that. He’d pushed for extraordinary measures to be taken to prevent an outbreak of Mongolian Flu. He looked at the images again. They were identical to Mongolian Flu.
Baylor had read the report of the mall riot as it went national. Nothing about it sounded like what an outbreak of Mongolian Flu would cause. He’d just dismissed it as panic and ignored it. He opened up his web browser to read the latest reports and made a note to ask his assistant for the field reports as soon as possible.
Ten minutes later, he’d read enough to know this wasn’t Mongolian Flu or at least not exactly the same thing. For starters, the crowd in the mall didn’t attack the first responders. The deaths appeared to have been caused by people getting trampled and not intentionally. He couldn’t find any examples of direct violence between the crowd. It was just a violent outcome.
Baylor felt relieved. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window again. Mongolian Flu was one of the many nightmare scenarios he had to deal with on a daily basis. It was horrific in that it affected a lower part of people’s brains and switched on the fight reflex. It was dangerous because all evidence indicates it was manmade.
The first case was brought to their attention by a Red Cross worker in Mongolia. His team was immunizing children in a yurt village when they told him about a “wild man” that chased them back to the village. When the worker went with two other men to look for him, they found his body with a bullet to the head. An old woman said she’d seen a military helicopter in the area. When he asked the local military commander, he said he didn’t know anything about it but oddly came back later that night to seize the body. Fortunately, the aid worker had taken blood samples before soldiers in masks took the body away.
The blood samples sat in a refrigerator in the CDC until a Chinese defector passed along some documents including a video of a gruesome experiment apparently performed in a Chinese-controlled prison in Mongolia.
Baylor had used the video to get funding and push through programs that otherwise saner minds would have said no to. Shot with a handheld camera, it showed forty Asian men in prison uniforms led into the center of a prison yard wearing blindfolds. Six men in green hospital gowns injected the kneeling men with a handful of syringes and then quickly left the yard. At first, nothing happened. The men sat there obediently awaiting further instruction. Then a handful began to make growling sounds and pull away their blindfolds like animals. The camera zoomed into bloodshot eyes and the claw-like way they held their hands. Within moments it was pandemonium as men leaped to their feet and attacked one another with teeth and claws. They opened up huge gashes in throats and clawed at each other’s eyes. Two men would attack another and then attack another when he was down. The camera tried to capture as much of the blood frenzy as was possible, but it was all over in under four minutes. The dead lay there with their fingers held out like claws and their lips pulled back in an angry expression. Calm, dispassionate voices spoke in Chinese making clinical observations.