"Hey, dickwad! I'm talkin' ta you!" Troy Lee shouted again.
"Shut the fuck up," Sylvester Swift said, his deep bass voice coming out of the cell, two down and one across on the narrow tier.
Sylvester Swift had been doing natural life at Leavenworth for attacking two soldiers in the enlisted men's mess at Fort Dennis with a stolen kitchen knife. The unprovoked assault had been over the theft of some candy bars taken out of Sylvester's footlocker. Both soldiers had died before they made it to the base hospital.
Williams and Swift were the only two prisoners incarcerated at Vanishing Lake Prison. The outdated Texas penal facility had been shut down a year ago, and then given by the state to the Science Department at Sam Houston University, which rented it to Fort Detrick.
Three days ago Troy Lee Williams and Sylvester Swift had been secretly transferred there.
"… Then after, nobody tells me shit. This bushy-haired fuck asks me if I'm a goddamn Jew. Me, he asks me, if I'm some ethnic mistake. Fuckin' pissed me off… Hey, answer me, will ya? I'm talkin' ta you!"
Sylvester Swift tried to ignore him. He was also wondering why he'd been transferred all the way here from Leavenworth Prison. He too was worried about the sound of electric drills and saws coming from behind the steel door. One of the M. P. guards had told him the old gas chamber was back there.
Sylvester thought the last ten days had been weird, from the thorough two-day medical exam he'd been given at Leavenworth, to the flight in the unmarked military C-141 Starlifter. He'd been cuffed and seated with two armed guards, neither of whom had any rank or unit designation on his uniform.
They had sat in the back of the huge cargo plane, amid cartons of medical supplies, and flown nonstop all the way to a military landing strip south of Waco, Texas. Then they switched planes, getting into a light amphibious Caribou. They took off again and flew into the mountains. Staying low under the radar, they flew through canyons, eventually making a water landing on a crater lake. As Sylvester got out of the plane, the mountainous wooded beauty of the place struck him. Tall Pines rimmed a clear blue lake, which was almost five miles in diameter, marred only by a huge, gray concrete block prison that loomed at the water's edge like a Transylvanian castle.
After Sylvester was admitted to Vanishing Lake Prison, they examined him thoroughly again, collecting blood and skin scrapings. It was then that he met the strange, skinny doctor with the bushy hair who examined Sylvester's ebony body, looking for physical defects. The plantation-style inspection pissed him off. The skinny man wore no military uniform; instead, he was in a lab coat over civilian clothes. He had piercing green eyes, and Sylvester judged him to be about forty-six or -eight.
The man didn't give his name, but asked Sylvester the same questions they had asked him numerous times at Leavenworth. Did he have any family or friends? If so, would he please list them? Did he know his genealogical history?
"I got nobody," he had growled impatiently, pouring out racial hatred with his best street-corner eye fuck.
Dr. Dexter DeMille looked at the clipboard in his hand containing Sylvester Swift's entire service and medical record. "Your file says you've been incarcerated at Leavenworth for three years, without any personal visits. Do you really have no friends, Sylvester?"
"Got no friends," Sylvester growled. "Want no motherfuckin' friends. Jus' do shit my own self."
After his check-in at Vanishing Lake Prison, Sylvester had been led in chains across the empty compound. He was taken to the fifth tier of the center pod. As he walked down the corridor in the old death house, he heard the loud voice of Troy Lee Williams for the first time. Sylvester was locked in his cell and had been forced to endure Troy Lee's babble and the sounds of constant construction in the nearby gas chamber ever since.
The drill stopped whining and a hammer started banging at the end of the corridor behind the steel door. "Whatta you suppose them fucks is building in there?" Troy Lee said.
Dr. Dexter DeMille knew he was on the verge of a historic, strategic military breakthrough. Despite this sense of impending victory, his nightmares had intensified. They had been throwback dreams about his work with Carleton Gajdusek in New Guinea in the early seventies. The dreams were always in black and white. He and Carl would be brutally killing the aboriginal women instead of heroically saving them. Then in the dream he was hacking their heads open like pineapples and emptying their liquefied cerebral tissue onto the dusty ground, watching their brains splatter in the dirt. Every night for a month, he had been waking up in terror, his body drenched with sweat. He was convinced the dreams were ominous warnings from his subconscious.
When he thought of those two men, recently transferred onto the center block, God help him, his mind did a strange emotional pirouette. Thoughts of guilt about their fate were immediately followed by an overpowering thrill of impending discovery.
He moved around his lab, collecting the DNA and genome charts for Troy Lee and Sylvester. The protein markers were so specific that both men's exact genealogical makeup and weaknesses in their DNA were displayed, as if pinpointed on a map.
Dexter knew Admiral Zoll now considered him a security risk. His bouts with insomnia and depression were getting worse. Twice in the last year he had attempted suicide. He had also flown into unexplained and uncontrollable rages, breaking up his own lab. Military guards, clean-cut men in pressed uniforms with ordinary backgrounds and intelligence, were posted to watch him constantly. Once he was finished with the human testing, he suspected, Admiral Zoll's plans for him would not include popping champagne corks. Dexter was running out of rope.
It was time to check the mosquito larvae boxes, so he moved out of the main lab down a corridor to the adjoining room where the mosquitoes were bred. He paused to put on the heavy canvas jumpsuit, gloves, and HEPA filter mask before opening the door stenciled with big red letters:
DANGER BIO-CONTAINMENT AREA LEVEL 3
Once he was suited up, he entered the smaller lab. He moved across the room and looked into the two glass boxes that were positioned on the center island. From a distance they almost looked as if they contained swirling smoke, but once you got closer it became apparent that the boxes really contained hundreds of newly bred, swarming mosquitoes. Some were still on the floor of the boxes, sitting on a tray of blood jelly, feasting on his newly designed Pale Horse Prion, PHpr: the deadly rogue protein that he had injected into the blood gel.
He looked in at the young, freshly hatched females still poised on long spindly legs over the gel, sucking up the Prion with their needle-nosed tubular labrums.
There were only a few of them left on the bottom of the glass box. Most were now blooded with his gruesome cocktail, flying around, desperately looking for a warm body to attack. He picked up the phone in the windowless bio-containment room and dialed the number for the gas chamber. Dr. Charles Lack answered the phone. Before he spoke, Dexter DeMille took a deep breath.
"I guess I'm ready," he said.
Troy Lee was screaming obscenities as they dragged him up to the old gas chamber, located in the tower of Center Block.
The door to the chamber was opened and Troy Lee's T-shirt was ripped off, then he was thrown into the small enclosure. He hit the far wall hard and slid to the floor. "Whatta you doing? Okay, please…" he was pleading now. "I'm sorry… okay? I'm sorry."
Two M. P. S in white helmets, armbands, and jumpboots grabbed Sylvester, removed his shirt, and walked him into the chamber. Then the door was closed and bolted.
The air lock hissed.
Troy Lee was screaming again, but nobody in the tower area outside the chamber could hear him, because the gas chamber was constructed out of two heavy glass boxes, one air-locked inside the other.