“Nothing that prepared you for what you’re about to see, Ranger. You can count on that.”
Passing through the tube en route to the thick plastic sheeting separating Hoover’s Cooking from the outside world was like some crazy Disney World ride played out for real. Caitlin half expected mechanical or animated creatures to jump out or launch an attack on her from outside the tube.
“The victims were all eating lunch,” she heard Jones say in her helmet. “Various stages of their meals.”
“So they didn’t die at the same time, in the same moment?” Caitlin asked, her voice echoing in her ears.
“Pretty damn close. Within seconds of each other, as near as we can tell. Suggests something airborne, doesn’t it, Ranger?”
“I don’t know.”
“Despite all that annual training you receive at Quantico?” Jones chided. “Come on.”
“It just doesn’t feel like a pathogen to me.”
“Something else?”
“Something worse,” Caitlin told him, not yet sure why.
42
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Caitlin followed Jones through the remainder of the tube, parting the last dangling sheets of heavy plastic to enter the normally down-home confines of Hoover’s Cooking. She imagined she could smell eggs frying, bacon cooking, and coffee lifted off BUNN warmers to be poured into the restaurant’s bountiful cups. But all that slipped away, along with her breath, when the sight beyond her helmet’s faceplate was revealed.
Several of the bodies were lying frozen on the floor, arms extended as if to claw forward along the tile toward the entrance now encased in biohazard plastic. Others sat straight up, only the dead sightlessness of their frozen eyes giving away the fact they weren’t waiting for their meals to be served. Still more were facedown on tabletops or booths strewn with spilled liquids and food. A few were slumped in their chairs, their limbs canted at odd angles, as if they had been trying to rise when whatever had happened in here struck them. It was like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting drawn by the devil, amid the pie cases and walls covered with fifteen years of pictures from the history of Hoover’s Cooking.
“Welcome to the party, Ranger,” Caitlin heard Jones say.
A combination of the suit’s confines and the encased building’s lack of ventilation left her feeling she was being roasted alive. At Quantico she’d been part of any number of drills to prepare her as a first responder to such calamities, but the props and stage dummies had in no way achieved their goal. The suit’s restrictions and independent air supply kept all odors from her, though, for which she was glad.
“Give me your first thoughts,” Jones said, alongside her now.
“Spacing of the bodies indicates a time lag that puts airborne transmission more in doubt,” Caitlin started, getting used to the echo of her own words inside the helmet. “That means the victims might have ingested whatever killed them, as opposed to breathing it in, making the means of delivery a toxin placed inside something they ate or drank.” She raised a glove to swipe away the sweat forming inside her helmet, forgetting the presence of the faceplate for the moment.
“Toxin,” Jones repeated. “Quantico must’ve treated you well, Ranger. Most would say ‘contagion.’”
“Contagion implies ‘spread from person to person.’ There was no spread here. It hit fast and it hit hard.”
“Are you ruling out natural causation?”
“That’s a new term on me, Jones. But if you’re asking if this could’ve been caused by poisoning through means other than a concentrated attack, I’d say the odds are slim to none.”
“You learn to make that kind of judgment in Quantico?”
“You asked me a question and the answer’s a matter of common sense. Naturally occurring disasters like this—Legionnaires’ disease, methane dumps, toxic sludge—aren’t unprecedented, but none of them carry a hundred percent mortality rate.”
“So,” Jones ventured, his faceplate misting up and then clearing in rhythm with his breaths and his words, “assuming enemy action was in play, what stands out the most in your mind?”
Caitlin walked about the restaurant, careful to step over the victims who had slipped from their chairs or died crawling for the door. To a man and woman, they looked to be in the throes of both pain and panic. She stopped at a table occupied by two boys and two girls wearing school uniforms, backpacks tucked under their chairs, their faces pressed against the tabletop as if they’d been glued there.
“Looks like they were all struck within maybe a thirty-second window,” Caitlin theorized, turning away from the kids.