PROLOGUE

Creation

Excerpt from CODE: ALHPA, a techno-thriller by Joseph Massucci

U.S. Army BL-4 Biological Laboratory
Fort Detrick, Maryland
Monday, January 11
 

“We’ve got a breach!”

A horn blared in the lab’s staging area, synchronized with a flashing red light. Both technicians were on their feet, checking the rows of screens on the tactical console.

“Do we have contamination?”

“Checking.”

There came a high-pitched whine, followed by a metallic click.

“Autolock sequence complete.”

“Jesus, he’s sealed inside.”

Burns, the center’s chief engineer, pushed his wire-frame glasses up the bridge of his nose as he spun around to one of the computer monitors. “Talk to me, Ricky, what kind of situation do we have in there?”

Rick, the youngest technician to be assigned to a Ft. Detrick’s maximum containment laboratory, jabbed one reset button after another, checking and rechecked the readouts. “I’m not getting anything.”

Burns switched on the scanner. “Air particulates?”

“Zero. The air’s clean. Whatever’s happening in there is not in the air.”

“He hit the manual alarm – must’ve torn his suit.” Burns checked the video monitor and saw Dr. David French inside the BL-4 “hot suite” hunched over a lab bench like a nearsighted jeweler. He appeared to be cradling his arm, but Burns couldn’t be sure because of the camera’s angle. He punched the intercom. “Doctor, talk to me.”

No answer.

“Jesus,” Rick said, “he isn’t moving.”

“I want you to get the colonel down here fast.”

There was genuine fear in Rick’s eyes as he bolted from the lab’s staging area, his footsteps echoing down the cinderblock corridor.

Burns pulled the receiver to his ear, nearly ripping the cord out of the wall. “Security, we have a Code Seventeen SIGMA alarm in BL-4. Repeat, a Code Seventeen SIGMA alarm in BL-4. Auto containment procedure completed.”

Burns could hear a thin voice on the other end asking questions, but the siren masked out the meaning of the words. He put a finger into his left ear and shouted, “I can’t hear you. We have a Code Seventeen down here. Dr. French needs assistance, for Chrissake. He may have breached his suit.” Burns glanced up at the close-circuit monitor. One of the cameras was still trained on the lab bench, but he could not see Dr. French. “Get Colonel Westbrook down here NOW!”

Julie Martinelli burst into the staging area, her white-frock lab coat flowing behind her like a cape, her hard-soled shoes pounding the grated flooring. “What’s happened?” she shouted over the siren. “Where’s Dr. French?”

“Inside,” Burns said. “He’s locked inside.”

Julie scanned the monitors and checked the readouts. “There’s no air contamination. What the hell is he doing in there?”

“He hit the alarm,” Burns shouted over the din.

“I can’t hear a thing.” Julie punched a console button and silenced the siren; the red light, however, would keep flashing until the center’s commander reset the security system.

“I don’t see him.” Julie panned the lab’s two cameras first one way, then the other. “Where the hell is he?”

Burns shrugged. “He was at his lab bench a moment ago.”

“David?” Julie said into the intercom. “Can you answer me please?”

Still no answer.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this. I don’t like the way he’s been acting – that detached look of his, always in his own world like he’s plotting something.” Julie zoomed in one of the camera’s lenses on Dr. French’s lab bench and panned slowly. She could see the active gamma radiation unit . . . the beakers . . . the vials labeled “Group A streptococcal virus” . . .

“David, you stupid son of a bitch.” Julie removed her lab coat and opened a suit locker with a bang.

Burns reeled away from the console. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

She stepped into the one-piece, full-body polyurethane laboratory suit, a second skin she always called her prophylactic overcoat, and pulled it up to her waist. “I’m going inside.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Burns said. “Only the colonel can reset that door. Besides, security’s on its way.”

“I’m not waiting.”

Burns stood defiantly in her way. “You don’t have much—”

“Excuse me, please.” Julie pushed passed him and took a seat before one of the three computer workstations and brought up the lab’s security interface.

****** ACCESS CONTROL CODE? ******

“Don’t even think about it,” Burns said. “The colonel gets a little testy when grad students start decompiling his security system’s computer code.”

She began typing, then entering, typing, entering.

****** LAB ACCESS DENIED ******

More typing.

****** MACRO COMPILED — PROCEED? ******

“Yes, please,” she said to the screen, then jabbed the enter key.

****** PLEASE WAIT ******

“Julie, you’re making me very nervous,” Burns said, watching her.

****** MACRO COMPLETED ******

“Piece of cake,” she said, then entered a final command.

****** AUTHORIZED ******

“Yes!”

“You’re going to get my ass canned,” Burns said.

Julie pulled the lab suit over her shoulders and thrust her arms into the sleeves, then fumbled to put each finger into the proper glove digit. Finished, she put on the hood and sealed it. She spun the releasing wheel on the vault-like door until it pulled forward with a loud hiss. “If the colonel ever gets his ass down here, tell him I’ve got one huge problem for him to handle.”

“Are you going to clue me in one what’s—”

Julie closed the fourteen-inch, two-ton stainless-steel door behind her with a mechanical click. Burns shook his head and said to no one in particular, “You’re a very dangerous young woman.”

Inside the lab, Julie attached her suit to one of the spring-coiled air-hoses hanging from the ceiling. The air supply hissed loudly in her ears and the magnified view through her face shield distorted objects beyond arm’s length.

The maximum containment laboratory was a claustrophobic compartment of centrifuges, incubators, freezers, benches and computing workstations. Cluttered, but very high-tech. Her eyes scanned the lab and saw no one. Above the even rhythm of her amplified breathing, she could hear Mozart’s piano concerto Number Twenty Two flowing from a dictating cassette recorder.

“David?”

No response. Julie stepped awkwardly to the lab bench. Her deep brown eyes scanned the bench’s culture dishes, beakers . . . the active gamma radiation unit . . . the syringe . . . then across the rack of vials labeled “Group A streptococcal virus” and a second labeled “tetrodotoxin.” She began sweating inside the suit.

“God Almighty—”

“My . . . head hurts.”

Julie whirled with a start. She recognized Dr. French’s features inside his suit – his shaved head, his magnificent handlebar mustache. But something was wrong; she could see his contorted expression beneath his magnifying face shield that made his eyes look like a pair of poached eggs.

Her anger swelled. “You son of a bitch. You did it, didn’t you?”

She expected him to begin reciting one of his world-class philosophical lectures about stretching the limits of the scientific envelope. But he said nothing to her.

Julie began shouting at him, “David, you made me a promise . . .”

She grew suddenly quiet. Her wide eyes stared at the drop of blood beading atop the fingertip of French’s white polyurethane glove. A shot of adrenaline rushed through Julie’s arteries, exploding in a tingling sensation at the root of her scalp. Was he even aware, she thought? “Your finger . . .”

He held out his finger to her as though it belonged to a helpless lab animal he had just infected. “Stupid . . . so stupid . . . a small distraction . . . I never felt the needle.”

Julie touched his shoulder. “I’ll take you into deconnnnnnn . . .”

A ringing in Dr. French’s ears made her voice sound as though it came from the far end of a deep tunnel. His vision blurred and a wave of nausea swept through him. Sweat drenched the inside of his suit.

He forced a pathetic smile. “There’s an army of red ants burrowing through my brain.”

“Davvviiiiiddddddddddd . . . ?”

Dr. French stared at her, his lower lip quivering. The sublime beauty of Mozart’s concerto turned to discordant banging in his ears. “Julie, my head hurts—”

His chest tightened in a vise and he coughed, speckling his face shield with blood-laden mucus. He reached for a row of bottles on the table and realized to his horror that his hand no longer was his own. Julie stared transfixed at his trembling and twitching fingers. His arm began to undulate, wavy movements like those of an inept exotic dancer. He had lost all muscular control.

“Glancic . . . glancic . . . glancic . . .” He couldn’t form the word.

Julie grabbed the doctor firmly by his shoulders and tried to ease him back onto a lab stool. The violent energy flooding his body lashed out at her, catching her Plexiglas face shield at the chin. The blow drove her backward onto one of the lab’s two scanning tunneling microscopes, rocking back the seven-hundred-pound instrument. He could only watch, astonished, at what he had just done; he felt no exertion at all.

French collapsed in a heap, his face a grimacing mask of agony, his arms and legs flailing in a thrashing dance of death. He grabbed his suit at the neck and pulled it downward as though it were a bib, splitting the material.

“The heat . . . the awful heat!”

Julie, incredulous, watched as radical dehydration shrank the biochemist into a wizened caricature of his former self. Ruptured capillaries turned his skin black and blue. Patterns of bodily decay were exacerbated and accelerated, as in a time-lapse film, detailing the organism’s utter devastation.

She stepped timidly back. “David . . . you stupid son of a bitch . . . ”

Finally, Dr. French grew still – it was over. He lay heaped in a twisted pile, the air flow from the ceiling-mounted hose giving his pulsating suit an illusion of life. Red and yellow sap oozed from the suit’s tear, forming a loathsome puddle around him.

Julie knelt down and, breathing deeply, peered through the face shield at what was left of the doctor’s face. His eyes flared open and gazed up at her through the magnified face shield. Those eyes! His face – a visage bubbling with secretions – had forfeited any claim to humanity. Dr. French had literally melted inside his suit.

His rubber hand grabbed her wrist with fingers that still possessed surprising strength. As she watched in horror, the ravaged flesh parted where the mouth should have been and tried to form words, failing miserably. The foul moan that erupted from his throat sounded like the last breath of a dying wolf.

Julie cried out. No sound at all penetrated the lab’s fourteen-inch metal walls. n

CODE: ALPHA

a techno-thriller by Joseph Massucci

A LEISURE BOOK TECHNOTHRILLER

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© 1997 Joseph Massucci.  All rights reserved.

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