Hell's Gate(74)
“Cooperative?” Wolff asked, picking up a surgical mask.
“Well, once we learned how to control and muzzle your little horror, obtaining saliva from it was not much of a problem.” Kimura understood, already, that what he really needed was another half century of technological development to truly comprehend how the draculae microbe worked. No one knew what a genetic code really looked like, and yet the secret of how the draculae symbionts caused rapid bleeding was down there somewhere, in the bacterial genes, the secret code of life. The microbiologist discovered, however, that he did not have to know very much about bacterial genetics to isolate a biological weapon from the beast’s saliva. Ignorance had turned out to be no obstacle to application.
“The challenges became interesting but never serious,” he explained to Wolff. “I’m guessing that this bacterium normally resides in the bat’s salivary glands. Nothing too interesting there. Initially, I was puzzled by the microbe’s strange reproductive cycle. But as is usually the case, getting this one to multiply was not at all difficult. In fact, once I infused the agar growth media with fresh plasma, the bacterial cultures experienced exponential growth. Just as suddenly, though, they died.”
Wolff interrupted. “Yes, yes. I was there. Remember? But isn’t that the problem? How can you culture the pathogen and prevent it from entering the self-destructive phase of its life cycle before it can be packaged and launched?”
“Ah, the unique microbial suicide that follows soon after the bite of your winged nightmare.”
“The same,” Wolff said, beginning to lose patience.
Kimura puffed himself up slightly, and with a wave of a chubby hand he dismissed a challenge that had, in reality, taken his team several days of nonstop work to overcome.
“We know that when the bat bites, the bacteria enter the victim’s blood—”
“Yes, yes,” Wolff interrupted again, making a cutting motion with his hand. “Would it be too much to ask for something I don’t already know?”
Kimura bowed slightly. “Of course; my apologies. It appears that there are factors in the blood of an adult victim, and even in juvenile blood, that initiate the autolytic phase of the bacteria’s life cycle. As the bacteria disintegrate, something they release causes the prey to bleed out. Now, by using fetal plasma, even umbilical extract works nicely, we have successfully bypassed the bacteria’s exposure to ASF.”
“ASF?”
“I call it Autolysis Stimulating Factor.”
“And where did you get this fetal tissue?”
Kimura smiled. “More volunteers,” he said cheerfully, gesturing to an examination table where a gore-stained sheet lay crumpled into a ball. “Savages.”
He’s using our useful allies as lab rats as well as bat food. Wolff put the thought away, nodded, and simply said, “Proceed.”
“I was able to determine that bacteria cultured in ASF-free growth media multiply explosively but then enter a dormant phase. I would expect to find a similar dormancy taking place somewhere in your pet.”
“Like a seed,” Wolff said, as much to himself as to Kimura. But there was no mistaking the rising excitement in his voice.
Kimura smiled again. “Very much like a seed . . . an apt analogy. A seed waiting to be planted . . . waiting to hatch out once it enters a victim’s body.”
“But a seed that will never grow into a tree,” Wolff added.
“True. Once the seed is watered, it dies and spreads its poison. The original culture carries on in the host.”
“So there’s absolutely no chance that this seed will multiply and show up at our front door once the enemy has been destroyed?”
“Correct, again.”
After savoring his moment of one-upmanship, the Japanese biologist gestured toward two rows of small, pod-shaped structures—mission-ready components from his lab in Manchuria that he had brought aboard the Demeter. Now, pulsing with life’s surge, they had been mounted under a climate-controlled isolation hood.
Wolff was about to ask how he planned to infect entire populations with the bacterium when Kimura brought an index finger up to his lips.
“Shhhhhh,” he whispered. “The children are sleeping.”
By the morning of February 8, two days after his rescue, R. J. MacCready was up and about, no longer needing reassurance that his friends were not ghosts.
“Gotta stop Wolff,” MacCready said. “Gotta blow that place.”
“Of course, Redundzel,” Thorne said. “Just like you’ve been ranting for the last two days. Although walking ten feet without falling on your face is usually a requirement for attacking a missile base.”
“You need to walk at least twenty feet, Mac,” Yanni added.
The trio had kept a low profile since their reunion. Yanni had built a well-camouflaged lean-to and nursed MacCready back to health with a combination of leaves, tree sap, and smashed seeds. Thorne was assigned sentry duty and did what little cooking they dared over a small campfire lit for the briefest periods each day.
“With you in broken-record mode, once we deciphered this crying Wolff thing, we took the liberty of procuring you some very interesting supplies.”
MacCready glanced over at Yanni, who gestured toward a backpack set a conspicuous distance from their tiny camp. “Tick tick boom,” she said with a smile.