Jacqueline Druga - Omnicide

“Only if you touch it and only for another twenty-four hours. That should kill it.”

“Jesus.” Kit paced. “So I don’t call county. Just leave the bodies here in the middle of the living room to rot.”

“There’s no one to call.”

The call Kit wanted to make at that moment was bullshit. To him there was no way, no how, no one was around and gone that fast. It wasn’t possible.

Since they couldn’t do anything about Brian and Patty, Kit cranked up the AC as high and cold as it could go and requested everyone go back at the police station.

Cass was the last one to enter. “Okay, I stopped by Doctor Holloway’s home,” she said as she walked in. “He’ll be here momentarily.”

“Did you stop anywhere else?” Kit asked. “Tell anyone else.”

“You mean did I go to Ada’s?”

Kit nodded.

“No.”

“Okay, because you took a while.”

“Oh, I stopped at Brass Balls for another shot.”

“Cass.”

“What?” She pulled out a chair and joined them around Kit’s desk. “It’s the end of the world.” She glanced over at Art and Bill. “‘As we know it.’ Other than the doc, are we waiting for anyone else? The chief because I think this situation warrants me being allowed to break the restraining order.”

“You have a restraining order against the chief of police?” Art asked.

“Oh, no, he has one against me. Long story.”

“Yes,” Kit said. “We won’t get into it. The chief… I was unable to get ahold of him.”

“Where was he?” Art asked.

“West. He was helping his brother all day.”

Bill nodded. “So he’s dead.”

“We don’t know that,” Kit snapped. “I tried Seaver. Maybe their communications are down. I need to go there…”

“Not yet,” Art said. “Tomorrow. Not before.”

Kit tossed out his hands. “I wish to God you’d tell me what you know.”

“I will. When the doctor gets here, so I won’t have to explain it more than once.”

The old-fashioned ding-a-ling bell rang and a younger man walked in. He wasn’t much older than thirty. Deliberately shaved bald head, and thin.

“Hey, Doc,” Kit said.

“He…” Bill pointed. “Is the town doctor? Looks so young. I pictured some older guy.”

Cass shook her head. “We don’t have an old town doctor. We have a county PCP that comes in. Sets up shop. They do like a three-year tour of duty. No one stays. They send us residents fresh from the hospital. We know when we get a new pastor a new doctor isn’t far behind.”

The young doctor shook Bill’s and Art’s hands. “You can call me Craig or Doc. Whichever you prefer. What’s going on?”

“Pull up a chair,” Kit instructed. “We have a situation on our hands.”

“Since you called me, I am assuming it is of a medical nature,” Craig said.

“Wide scale,” Art told him. “Global.”

“Is it here?” Craig asked. “In Griffin?”

“In a way,” Art explained. “There are a lot of variables involved. They wouldn’t have been exposed to it here. But if they were out of town yesterday. Were you out of town yesterday?”

“Yes,” Craig said. “I was northeast yesterday morning doing rounds at the hospital. I was back here before noon.”

“Then you’re fine,” Art said. “Anyone west of here after ten a.m. and anyone east of here after three p.m. are in danger.”

“What about north and south?” Cass asked.

Bill answered. “Noon.”

“But the thing is,” Art said, “if they were affected, they would have symptoms now. Has anyone called you with symptoms like a bad rash, trouble breathing, severe burning when breathing, stuff like that?”

“Got two calls yesterday about rashes.”

“Was Brian one of them?” Cass asked.

“Yeah, and the other was Mrs. Sanders.”

“This is important,” Art said. “Did you see them? Examine them?”

Craig shook his head. “No. I didn’t. I just told them to use a topical or Benadryl if the itching was too much. They could get both at the grocery. So I take it this is highly contagious and lives on a surface?”

“It does,” Art said. “But not for long. You can’t… shed it like a normal virus. It doesn’t carry in droplets. It does carry in blood. It transfers from hand to surface—the longer it is on the skin, the more it loses strength. Outside of Griffin right now, it will run out of hosts and die off by tomorrow. We just need to find anyone and everyone that’s left. Stop people from leaving. Check any place they may have stopped or been.”

“Disinfect?” Kit asked.

“No. Disinfectant won’t kill this. Time does, that’s the only thing. Close the establishment if we see it with a black light. Twenty-four hours.”

“Fuck,” Cass blurted out. “Brian was at Brass Balls and Beer.”

“Then you’ll be happy to know it’s clean,” Bill said. “My son checked it last night. The bartender was very nice about him doing that. We told him it was an experiment.”

“On a positive note,” Art said, “it really isn’t that easy to transfer to a surface. An affected person really needs to be exposed to that surface for a while and steadily. Just stopping in the store won’t do it.”

Craig waved out his hand and facially showed he was confused. “By no means am I a virus expert, but this thing sounds very different with a unique set of rules you seem to know very well.”

“I do and sadly I should,” Art said. “I created it.”

“You’re a scientist,” Kit stated.

He reined in control when Cass and Craig both seemed to go off after Art took credit or responsibility for what was happening.

“Yes,” Art answered. “A microbiologist. My specialty is mycology, study of fungi, bacteria, that sort of thing,”

Kit looked at Bill. “Are you a scientist, too?”

“No, no, no.” He shook his head. “I’m a rancher. I just know weather patterns.”

“And it’s a good thing,” Art said. “He and I wouldn’t be alive if he didn’t.”

“I am so lost,” Kit said. “What is happening?”

“Let me go back to the beginning,” Art said.

“Please,” Kit said.

“As you know the ladybug was an issue with crops. So the stinkbug was genetically manipulated to quell the ladybug problem. Then the stinkbug got out of control. Enter the pred bug. No one would have thought that was going to be as bad as it got. It destroyed everything. All of you know this. This year alone it was predicted that sixty percent of the crops would be lost if we didn’t do anything. The Secretary of Agriculture called me,” Art said. “Find a solution. Nothing was working on them. Nothing previously tried. The pred bug was impervious to anything and they multiplied at an astronomical rate.”

Craig spoke, “I read an article that if they weren’t eliminated this year, they’d be everywhere.”

“One shouldn’t mess with mother nature,” Art said. “That’s correct. So I was called in to find a solution. And it hit one night in a hotel when I saw a bed bug. Beauveria Bassiana . A fungus. The hardest bug to kill is a bed bug. They’re resilient. Yet, they die from Beauveria Bassiana . So I needed to find the right fungus. It’s not unusual or uncommon to use fungi or bacteria on bugs to wipe them out. But nothing worked. I had to create a superior fungus. One that didn’t hurt plants or agriculture, only the pred bugs. I mean I knew we could lose other bugs, maybe some birds, but the end result was the elimination of the pred bug and that was most important. All testing showed it was safe.”

“When did you learn it wasn’t?” Kit asked.

“A week before the extermination blitzkrieg launch. The whole plan was to spray everywhere within a twenty-four-hour window, all across the globe. Now you can’t spray every location so you have to rely on using a highly concentrated formula that would carry with the wind, jet streams, a global extermination. The effort was quite ambitious. Because the spores lose effectiveness in twenty-four hours, they would spot exterminate after that.”