She heard a faint crinkling sound, like someone crumpling paper. She looked from one man’s belly to the next. There was no sign of movement. Just pale skin mottled by flaccid blue veins and—
Wait.
There.
“Are you guys seeing this back there?”
“Nothing yet. What do you—?”
The man on the left erupted first. There was the merest ripple of skin, and then a tattered hole appeared and the air filled with wasps. The speed with which it transpired was staggering. She had seen it happen to the cocker spaniel with her own eyes, and yet she was still caught off-guard. She never even saw Cranston’s abdomen tear open. God. She could hardly see anything through the sheer number of wasps swarming around her. They were all over her, crawling on her mesh mask, thrusting their stingers at her face, trying to sting her through the fabric. They were still juveniles, perhaps a third of the size of adult wasps and not yet fully developed, but no less terrifying. She stumbled forward, madly brushing them off. All she could see was the mass of seething bodies mere inches from her face that could kill her in a matter of seconds. The fabric felt too thin; their combined weight pressed it to her skin. A scream rose in her chest and burst past her lips, but the buzzing was so loud that she hardly heard it. She fell to her knees and swatted at the wasps on her veil. Carcasses crunched underneath her and she was certain that stingers prodded through the suit and into her knees. An all-consuming, blind panic took root. Screaming and thrashing, she tried to scurry away from them, but they were everywhere. All over her. Crawling under her hood, beneath her clothes, in her hair. She was certain of it.
She was going to die.
Lauren screamed and screamed until her throat was raw and she started to cough.
She opened her eyes and fought back the terror. The wasps were still everywhere, but they hadn’t penetrated her defenses. There were no stingers in her skin. She was going to be all right. Slowly, she rose to her feet and brushed the wasps away from her eyes so she could see. Both of the corpses were crawling with them. Over and over, they stung the lifeless bodies and returned to the air, only to be replaced by a seemingly inexhaustible supply.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“Are you okay in there for sure, Dr. Allen?”
She nodded and manipulated the chemical respirator under her face shield over her mouth. A fog descended from the ceiling and settled toward the floor. The shadowed forms of the insects were nearly invisible through the toxic cloud as they succumbed to the poison and dropped to the ground.
Their carcasses crackled underfoot like she was walking on bubble wrap as she studied the aftermath. There were so many of them that any effort to count them would be a waste of time they didn’t have.
The buzzing sound diminished, and then ultimately ceased altogether.
The corpses were black with stingers. It was impossible to tell what they might have once looked like, or even what color their skin had been.
This was their worst fear realized.
How could they prevent an attack that could kill countless thousands when they couldn’t see where the wasps were hiding or hear the sound that initiated their assault?
CHAPTER THREE
I
Atlanta, Georgia
The spectacle was like nothing she’d ever seen before. The tailgating had begun in earnest the day before, and by the time she arrived not long after sunrise, the parking lot was shoulder-to-shoulder with people as far as she could see. There were news crews from around the world, speaking in languages ranging from every possible dialect of English to some she had never heard in her life. The NFL Experience—a fantastic exhibit where everyone, from kids through adults, could learn what it was like to play in the pros through the use of pseudo-virtual reality technology—had drawn nearly as many patrons as the game itself. There were people drinking, grilling, fighting, playing, swearing, and cavorting everywhere she looked. They wore jerseys and face and body paint and reminded her of infantries preparing to go into battle. And all of them were blissfully unaware of the threat that could at any moment kill every single one of them.
The police and military presence was relatively unobtrusive, at least more so than she had hoped. While every access point was strictly controlled and every vehicle subjected to search, there was still too much foot traffic for her liking. The Georgia Dome had become a city unto itself, a teeming metropolis of nearly a hundred and fifty thousand crammed into a space of no more than five square miles. Even with the more than three thousand army, national guard, FBI, and police personnel, working the crowds was a task so daunting that Lauren feared they had lost the race before it even started.
Drab olive helicopters thundered overhead and a squadron of F-22 Raptors at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, twenty miles away in Marietta, was ready to scramble at a moment’s notice. The airspace was being carefully monitored and any aircraft that deviated as much as an inch from its flight plan was to be unceremoniously grounded. The president’s own secret service contingent numbered more than a hundred. Their instructions were to form an eight-man cordon around him at all times. The windows of his luxury box had been replaced with bulletproof glass and all ventilation ducts had been sealed. The door had been reinforced with several inches of solid steel and more than thirty monitors showing live footage of every emergency exit route from the suite had been installed. It was a panic room that could theoretically withstand anything shy of a nuclear detonation.
Still, Lauren had a bad feeling that disaster loomed on the horizon. Whoever created the wasps hadn’t done so overnight. It had surely taken years of trial and error, multiple previous incarnations, and unerring foresight to produce this particular species. Was it so difficult to think that these people could have been preparing for this very event since the moment the Georgia Dome was announced as the host of the game more than two years ago? Was it impossible to believe that a single faceless man could walk right through every single one of their checkpoints and martyr himself on national television?
Everyone on security detail had memorized the pictures of the man taken at the circus prior to the catastrophe. Even the employees manning the concession stands had a picture of him taped behind their counters. Every section had a dozen agents assigned to watch it, and there would be more than a hundred on the field itself, many of them posing as cameramen who would film the crowds and relay the feeds to computers that had been specifically programmed to analyze and detect erratic or inconsistent behavior. The fire suppression system had been modified to divert from the dry chemical tanks to ancillary drums containing more than five thousand gallons of insecticides at the flip of a switch. Even the PA announcer had been thoroughly vetted and his equipment had been modified so that it was incapable of producing any sound with a frequency higher than fourteen kilohertz, a full eight thousand hertz lower than the established sound trigger.
If there was anything they had missed, Lauren couldn’t think of it, and yet, at the same time, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something obvious they had overlooked.
She passed through security for the fourth different time that afternoon on her way into the stadium once again. The agent studied her face and her body before letting her pass into a gated section where she was patted down and her ID carefully scrutinized by two men in army fatigues before being allowed to pass. She worked her way through the mad throngs toward the command center, which had been set up behind the visiting team’s goalposts, directly under the lower tier of stands and between the tunnels from which the players would emerge onto the field through smoke and fireworks. Popcorn crunched underfoot and she nearly slipped in a puddle of beer. The entire place reeked of body odor, barley and hops, and processed meat products. The plainclothes forces blended into the woodwork all around her, betrayed only by the ceaseless motion of their eyes across the masses. And by the bulges of their shoulder holsters beneath their civilian attire.