Michael Crichton - Prey

"What is that?" Julia yelled.

The first of the octopus tubes burst open, high above us. Brown liquid steam hissed out. Another tube popped open, and another. The sound of hissing filled the room. The air was turning dark foggy brown, billowing brown.

Julia screamed "What is that?"

"It's the assembly line," Ricky said. "It's overheated. And it's blowing."

"How? How can that happen?"

I sat up, still coughing, and got to my feet. I said, "No safety systems, remember? You turned them off. Now it's blowing virus all through this room."

"Not for long," Julia said. "We'll have the safeties back in two seconds." Ricky was already standing at the control board, frantically hitting keys.

"Good thinking, Julia," I said. I lit my cigarette lighter, and held it under the sprinkler head.

Julia screamed, "Stop! Ricky, stop!"

Ricky stopped.

I said, "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."

Julia turned in fury and hissed, "I hate you."

Already her body was turning shades of gray, fading to a kind of monochrome. So was Ricky, the color washing out of him. It was the virus in the air, already affecting their swarms. There was a brief crackle of sparks, from high in the octopus arms. Then another short lightning arc. Ricky saw it and yelled, "Forget it, Julia! We take our chances!" He hit the keys and turned the safety system back on. Alarms started to sound. The screens flashed red with the excess concentrations of methane and other gases. The main screen showed: safety systems on. And the sprinklers burst into cones of brown spray. …

They screamed as the water touched them. They were writhing and beginning to shrink, to shrivel right before my eyes. Julia's face was contorted. She stared at me with pure hatred. But already she was starting to dissolve. She fell to her knees, and then onto her back. The others were all rolling on the floor, screaming in pain.

"Come on, Jack." Someone was tugging at my sleeve. It was Mae. "Come on," she said. "This room is full of methane. You have to go."

I hesitated, still looking at Julia. Then we turned and ran.

The helicopter pilot pushed the doors open as we ran across the pad. We jumped in. Mae said, "Go!"

He said, "I'll have to insist you get your harnesses on before-"

"Fly this fucking thing!" I yelled.

"Sorry, it's a regulation, and it's not safe-"

Black smoke started to pour out of the power station door we had just come out of. It billowed into the blue desert sky.

The pilot saw it and said, "Hang on!"

We lifted off and headed north, swinging wide of the building. Now there was smoke coming from all the exhaust vents near the roof. A black haze was rising into the air. Mae said, "Fire burns the nanoparticles and the bacteria, too. Don't worry."

The pilot said, "Where are we going?"

"Home."

He headed west, and within minutes we had left the building behind. It disappeared below the horizon. Mae was sitting back in her seat, eyes closed. I said to her, "I thought it was going to blow up. But they turned the safety system back on again. So I guess it won't." She said nothing.

I said, "So what was the big rush to get out of there? And where were you, anyway? Nobody could find you."

She said, "I was outside, in the storage shed."

"Doing what?"

"Looking for more thermite."

"Find any?"

There was no sound. Just a flash of yellow light that spread across the desert horizon for an instant, and then faded. You could almost believe it never happened. But the helicopter rocked and jolted as the shock wave passed us.

The pilot said, "Holy Mother of God, what was that?"

"Industrial accident," I said. "Very unfortunate."

He reached for his radio. "I better report it."

"Yes," I said. "You better do that."

We flew west, and I saw the green line of the forest and the rolling foothills of the Sierras, as we crossed into California.

It's late.

Almost midnight. The house is silent around me. I am not sure how this will turn out. The kids are all desperately sick, throwing up after I gave them the virus. I can hear my son and daughter retching in separate bathrooms. I went in to check on them a few minutes ago, to see what was coming up. Their faces were deathly pale. I can see they're afraid, because they know I'm afraid. I haven't told them about Julia yet. They haven't asked. They're too sick to ask right now.

I'm worried most about the baby, because I had to give her the virus, too. It was her only hope. Ellen's with her now, but Ellen is vomiting, too. The baby has yet to throw up. I don't know whether that's good or bad. Young kids react differently.

I think I'm okay, at least for the moment. I'm dead tired. I think I've been dozing off from time to time all night. Right now I'm sitting here looking out the back window, waiting for Mae. She hopped the fence at the end of my backyard, and is probably scrambling around in the brush on the slope that goes down behind the property, where the sprinklers are. She thought there was a faint green light coming from somewhere down the slope. I told her not to go down there alone, but I'm too tired to go get her. If she waits until tomorrow, the Army can come here with flame throwers and blast the hell out of whatever it is.

The Army is acting dumb about this whole thing, but I have Julia's computer here at home, and I have an email trail on her hard drive. I removed the hard drive, just to be safe. I duped it, and put the original in a safe deposit box in town. I'm not really worried about the Army. I'm worried about Larry Handler and the others at Xymos. They know they have horrific lawsuits on their hands. The company will declare bankruptcy sometime this week, but they're still liable for criminal charges. Larry especially. I wouldn't cry if he went to jail. Mae and I have managed to put together most of the events of the past few days. My daughter's rash was caused by gamma assemblers-the micromachines that assembled finished molecules from component fragments. The gammas must have been on Julia's clothing when she came home from the lab. Julia worried about that possibility; that was why she took a shower as soon as she got home. The lab itself had good decontamination procedures, but Julia was interacting with the swarms outside the lab. She knew there was a danger. Anyway, that night she accidentally let the gammas loose in the nursery. The gamma assemblers are designed to cut microfragments of silicon, but faced with a pliable substance like skin, they only pinch it. It's painful, and causes microtrauma of a sort that nobody had ever seen before. Or would ever have suspected. No wonder Amanda didn't have a fever. She didn't have an infection. She had a coating of biting particles on her skin. The magnetic field of the MRI cured her in an instant; all the assemblers were yanked away from her in the first pulse. (Apparently that is also what happened to the guy in the desert. He somehow came in contact with a batch of assemblers. He had been camping within a mile of the Xymos desert facility.) Julia knew what was wrong with Amanda, but she didn't tell anybody. Instead she called the Xymos cleanup crew, which showed up in the middle of the night while I was at the hospital. Only Eric saw them, and now I know what he saw. Because the same crew arrived here a few hours ago to sweep my house. They were the same men I'd seen in the van on the road that night.

The lead man wears a silver bunny suit that's antimagnetic, and he does look ghostly. His silvered mask makes him appear faceless. He goes into the environment first to check it out. Then four other men in coveralls follow, to vacuum and clean up. I had told Eric he'd dreamed it, but he hadn't. The crew left behind one of their sensor cubes, under Amanda's bed. That was intentional, to check for residual gammas in case they'd missed any. It wasn't a surge suppressor; it was just constructed to look like one.