"Max, what did you get us into?" she said softly. Then she checked the room one last time for anything that might be useful. She could see nothing else to take, so she slipped out of the cottage.
She took the wooded path that led up to the trash area, behind the restaurant. Once there, she set off across the hillside, staying in the trees, making her own trail. She went around the lake, moving toward the old prison. She didn't know whether she would die from deadly mosquito bites or at the hands of the cold-eyed soldiers. All she knew was that these were the same pricks who had killed Max, and they were about to kill more innocent people.
Stacy Richardson intended to make a photographic record of their crimes.
Chapter 11
Asshole!" Dale Cole screamed. He was pointing his side-by-side twelve-gauge at the overweight, sweating Douglas Ballard. They were in front of the Vanishing Lake Hardware Store. Douglas turned and made a desperate, lumbering run up the steps toward the door. Dale fired one barrel, blowing away part of Doug's right arm and shoulder before he got to the threshold. Douglas slumped against the dooijamb, groaning in pain. Then Dale stalked his old fishing buddy like a predatory animal, moving slowly and deliberately up the steps, screaming at him. He aimed the weapon and fired again, turning Doug Ballard's head into a blood mist, then Dale started digging in his pocket for a reload.
Barney saw it from the front window of the Bucket a' Bait. "I've had enough of this," he said, and grabbed a meat tenderizer off the counter. He grabbed Stu Marshall, one of his customers, "Come on, let's stop this," he said. Barney and Stu ran out of the restaurant and tackled Dale Cole just as he was snapping the reloaded barrels shut. They drove him back against the wall of the wooden front porch.
Like Sid Saunders, he fought them insanely, his eyes rimmed with red, shining with madness. While Stu tried to hold Dale, Barney hit him with the meat tenderizer, knocking him down. They both finally subdued him, tying him with their belts, as they had seen the soldiers do earlier. Barney and Stu then stood over Dale Cole. Both were shaking.
"What's going on? Why is this happening?" Barney asked, bewildered.
Stu couldn't speak, unable to grasp it.
"I'm gettin' outta here. Gonna go get us some help," Barney said. He moved off toward his car and, without even a look back, he jumped behind the wheel of his pickup and drove out of Vanishing Lake.
He was doing over seventy when he came around a bend and saw three fallen trees across the highway. He slammed on the brakes, going sideways in a free-wheel skid, stopping just a few feet from the massive trunks. Then two uniformed soldiers in bio-containment gear moved up to him, appearing almost from out of nowhere. They looked to Barney like a NASA flight crew, with their canvas suits and oxygen-fed helmets.
"You've got to go back," one of them said, his voice tinny through his filtered HEPA mask.
"What the fuck are you doing at that prison? What got loose up here? People I've known all my life are shooting each other in the streets!" he shouted. "People are going crazy!" The adrenaline was coursing through him, making him rage with anger.
The two soldiers took several steps back and pulled their side arms from web-gear holsters strapped over their bio-suits. "Go back," they said to him.
Barney didn't see how he could get around the armed soldiers and the fallen trees. After a minute of frustrated deliberation, he returned to his vehicle. "You people are gonna burn in hell for this!" he shouted. Then he got back into his idling truck, slammed it into reverse, and backed up fast. He spun the pickup around, burning rubber as he headed back to town.
"Two more cases," Nick Zingo reported. "One in town, one out on Lake Road. A few civilians are trying to run."
Admiral Zoll was seated in the parole boardroom, listening. It was dusk and he was looking out the window, trying to organize a new containment plan.
"These civilians are going to start hiking out. We're gonna need a strong N. P. D.," Nick Zingo said, referring to a night perimeter defense.
Admiral Zoll stood up. Out the window, in the fading orange sunset, he could dimly see the prison tower and shimmering lake beyond. He couldn't believe this was happening. He had been nurturing this program for twenty-seven years. He had fought to save it when Nixon had ordered it shut down in 1972. Zoll was just a Naval Commander then. He was recently back from Vietnam, had been the liaison to Fort Detrick, and was stationed at the Pentagon. He had quickly become a total believer in the work being done at the Devil's Workshop.
A strategic weapon was defined as anything capable of killing large numbers of people with a single strike. Zoll realized that in this category, bio-weapons far outperformed nuclear weapons. First, they were much cheaper. The huge Sums of money that were spent on nuclear armaments could be redirected to more practical conventional military operations. Second, bio-weapons didn't destroy the enemy's infrastructure. They didn't turn captured cities into smoking piles of radioactive rubble. Twenty-four hours after a toxic event, occupation forces could secure an area, and the telephones still worked. Third, devastating as they were, they attacked only people, not the environment.
He convinced several members of the Joint Chiefs and had quietly pursued a covert bio-weapons program at Fort Detrick, under the guise of running a defense against chemical and biological terrorist attacks. He had carefully masked it from Congress, setting up Pentagon funding through colleges and universities, disguising it all as research grants. He had brought troubled scientific geniuses, like Dexter DeMille, into the program at Fort Detrick to do the R amp;D. When the CIA had sniffed his program out, he had been forced to include Agency spooks, and had skillfully steered the program through the dangerous white-water rapids of multiple Congressional hearings caused by unauthorized CIA cowboy tactics. They'd brought heat on the program with their mosquito tests at Carver Village, the asinine San Francisco and Minnesota open-air experiments, and the incredibly foolish subway debacle in New York, when CIA agents had attempted to determine if germs placed in one subway tunnel could be spread by the trains' backdraft, eventually leaking out of air vents all through the city.
He had been dragged to Washington, but had managed to convince a wary Congress that despite a few lapses, the work being done at Fort Detrick fell inside the Presidential Order, allowing for the development of anti-terrorist science.
Now, all these years later, on the eve of their greatest bio-weapon triumph, because of a few escaped mosquitoes, the entire program might come crashing down. Worse still, despite his patriotic motives, he knew he would be vilified. He would be categorized with monsters like Adolf Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, who practiced wholesale genocide. The politicians and the American public would not accept the truth in his arguments. They would insanely prefer nuclear armaments, with their world-ending potential, to the far more practical bio-weapons.
Admiral Zoll knew this situation at Vanishing Lake was probably not going to be fully contained. Someone would slip out and tell the story. He needed a scapegoat to pin it on. Dexter DeMille was the obvious choice. He was the scientist who had designed the killer Prion in the first place.
DeMille was a temperamental, suicidal genius who often broke up his own lab in fits of uncontrollable rage and had been under constant suicide watch. It wasn't too big a stretch to believe that he had developed this bio-weapon without Admiral Zoll's approval, and that when his unsolicited research had been turned down and condemned, he had cracked and set his killer insects loose, and then, in a final self-destructive act, killed himself.