David Golemon - Ripper

Alice, with her mouth firmly set, stood and rushed to the stricken and speared man and then slammed her fist into his face, sending him over onto his left side.

Jack’s eyes went from the sudden movement of Alice’s attack to the spot where the man had been standing. His eyes widened when he saw none other than his own mother standing there with a shocked look on her face. She was dressed in slacks and had a new blouse on. Her blue eyes moved from Jack to the man she had just killed. Collins was amazed to see one of the pink plastic flamingos from the front yard pushed all the way through the man’s back. Its black plastic eyes were once more looking at Jack, but this time he didn’t mind the look.

“I … I … I have to sit down,” Cally Collins said as she reached for a chair.

Alice shook her hand in the air, knowing she had broken at least one knuckle and maybe two on the man’s face when she had struck him. She also knew she wouldn’t trade the pain for anything in world. She then helped assist Jack’s mother into a chair, stepping easily over the dead man.

Jack looked around with blood still running from the top of his head and over his left sideburn. He was still feeling woozy and knew he had better join his mother and Alice at the table.

“I … I … had a hard … time … finding your house,” Cally said as she tried to look up at Alice.

“Well, thank God you did, Mrs. Collins, or Jack and I wouldn’t have been here to greet you.”

“Ma, what made you think of the flamingo?” Jack asked as he wiped blood from the side of his face.

“Don’t you remember when you were a boy and you were scared to death of those things? You had nightmares about them … I’m not really making any sense am I?”

Jack reached out after placing the gun on the table and took both his mother’s and Alice’s hands in his own.

“Thank God for pink plastic flamingos,” he said.

“I just wanted to be here to meet your girl. Where is she?” Cally asked worriedly.

Jack looked up and released both of the women’s hands. He stood on shaky feet and then collapsed onto the table’s top.

“Oh!” Alice said as she ran to get the phone. She lifted the receiver and dialed while Cally tended to Jack.

The United States government offices you are trying to reach are temporarily experiencing technical problems with their phone lines. Please try your call again at a later time.

“Damn it!” Alice cursed as she looked from the phone in her hand to Cally and then to Jack. She made a quick decision and dialed a special number she knew by heart after so many years at the Event Group.

Cally looked up in confusion as she ran a hand over Jack’s face. She heard the words coming from Alice’s mouth, but couldn’t believe it.

“This is code 5656-01, Hamilton, Alice D. I need to speak to the president of the United States immediately.”

Gloria Bannister watched as the spectrograph started printing out the known substances that were used in the synthesized production of Lawrence Ambrose’s chemical formula. As she read the printout she checked off the substances that had already been verified by the supercomputer Europa. She shook her head as she tore the printout away from the machine and then handed the report to her father. Those from the CDC crowded around the list of names, matching them perfectly with what Europa had already told them. Colonel Bannister also shook his head.

“I’ve got to get me one of those computers,” he said as he looked up at the others dressed as he was. They all wore the same environmental chemical suit with hoods that attached but hung down the back, giving them a little breathing space. The chemical-genetic agent was placed behind two separate panes of sealed glass, and that was behind a steel wall that completely closed the clean room off from the laboratory on the seventeenth level of the complex. “I wonder if they sell this Europa thingamajig at Best Buy.”

The seven biologists from Atlanta laughed as they surrounded the colonel.

“Can you imagine the advanced science this Ambrose used? I mean, splicing poppies together as if he were doing nothing more than breeding roses? This was impossible science for that time period,” said Dr. Emil Harris, a brilliant man who headed the Viral section in Georgia. “The chemical properties alone would have made this man a giant in the field of chemical engineering.”

“Yes, but what in the hell was his goal? What was this genius after?” Gloria asked as she relieved her father of the chemical analysis report and started going over it again. Something at the bottom of the page that the spectrograph picked up caught her attention: agent 00012—unknown. “What do you suppose this could be, and this, an organic substance that is unidentifiable?”

Colonel Bannister looked over her shoulder. “Maybe some sort of binding agent perhaps. Something to keep the chemicals mixed — who knows? This other, the matrix of the substance, looks familiar. Almost like a DNA strand. But that would be impossible.”

“It’s something,” Gloria said, surprised her father wasn’t more concerned about it. As she looked over the printout, she walked to the far corner and sat down while the others started talking about the properties inherent in heroin and PCP. They all knew that the two poppy species alone produced high-grade hallucinogens, but when spliced together what chemical properties did they produce?

As Gloria looked at the report, she happened to look up at the observation window and saw several people watching their procedures from the area next to the clean room. She saw a familiar face talking with the assistant director of this strange complex, Dr. Pollock. Will Mendenhall happened to look up at the same moment she did. Their eyes met, and Gloria found she couldn’t help it; she smiled and then gave the lieutenant a quick wave of her hand. She was actually happy when Mendenhall returned the smile and waved back. Embarrassed when Dr. Pollock turned to see her schoolgirl gaze on the young black man, she quickly averted her eyes and looked down at the report. She just as quickly looked back up to see Will still staring at her. He nodded at something the doctor said and with one last smile turned and left the observation room.

“Gloria, shall we run the agent through the Agilent atomic spectroscopy? We’ll destroy some of the formula, but we’ll get a much clearer picture of just what we’re dealing with here.” The others nodded their heads in agreement.

Gloria stood from her chair and, with one last look back at the observation window in the hopes that Will had returned, went to the window looking into the clean room where Perdition’s Fire was still sitting atop the stainless-steel table, held in place by the robotic arms.

“I don’t think we should jump the gun here,” she said looking at the simplified spectrograph report. “We just don’t know how this will react to flame. And this other biological source, what in the hell is that? You’re right, it looks like a DNA strand, and we don’t know if the extreme heat will destroy it completely without getting it analyzed.”

They all knew that when the formula was burned by the atomic spectroscopy, it would release a momentary burst of evaporated material for the machine to pick apart and analyze. The problem as Gloria was seeing it was that since they were dealing with an unknown agent as listed on the report, they didn’t know what reaction the flame would have on the chemicals. It was a minimal chance of contamination she knew, but in their business a minimal chance could be deadly.

“Oh, I think we can safely say that it is statically speaking very unlikely this Ambrose created something that also reacts to heat. I mean the agent went through the spectrograph just fine, and that’s almost the same principle. As far as the second unknown is concerned, we always have more formula.”