Darkness at Dawn Read Online Free Page B

encrypted. She couldn’t understand them anyway. But on the bottom of the screen in a chyron, the white numbers were easy to understand.
     
    Biodata: temp: 99.7°, BPM: 120, BP: 110/70
     
    The satellite was able to read body temperature, the beats per minute of the heart and blood pressure. The man was running a slight temperature.
    He trudged forward, head down, moving as if in slow motion.
    Then the man swayed, fell to his knees and, shockingly, vomited. She heard breaths catch around her in the dark as a deep red projectile stream, horrifically bright against the white snow, came spewing out of him. He rose, shaking, to his feet, took a few steps and was wracked by another vicious bout of retching that went on and on, so long Lucy wondered how he was breathing. Bright streaks of red marred the snow.
    The man took another few steps, fell to his knees again.
    Data was streaming at the sides and across the top, but the most important statistics were along the bottom of the monitor.
     
    Biodata: temp: 103°, BPM: 160, BP: 110/60
     
    The man wasn’t getting up. He vomited again, an astonishing amount of material. Surely he hadn’t gone trekking in the mountains after a heavy meal? Though most of what he was vomiting seemed to be blood.
    There was heavy silence in the room as they watched the man try to get up and fail, and vomit again where he lay, collapsed, on the ground. His limbs were still, the only movements those necessary to retch. Everything that came out of his mouth now was bright red.
    It occurred to Lucy, with a hard squeeze to the heart, that she was watching a man die, alone in some frozen desert.
    No one spoke; they just watched the monitor as the file speeded up.
    Biodata: temp: 104°, BPM: 180, BP: 100/50
     
    Biodata: temp: 104.5°, BPM: 100, BP: 90/50
     
    Biodata: temp: 104.5°, BPM: 80, BP: 80/40
     
    Biodata: temp: 104.5°, BPM: 50, BP: 70/30
     
    Until finally:
    Biodata: temp: 104°, BPM: 0, BP: 0
     
    Lucy wanted to look away, but Uncle Edwin said quietly, with that vast authority he had that no one, including her, could possibly resist, “Wait. There’s more.”
    What else could there be? She thought. The man’s dead.
    But, horribly, there was more.
    Uncle Edwin clicked ahead, the white digits of the chronometer rolling forward faster and faster. What was it he wanted them to see beyond white fields of snow and a dead man, lying in a lake of his own blood, which expanded with each passing minute, deep red close to the body, lightening to a faint pink a couple of feet out?
    The minutes ticked by—an hour of film for each minute of real time—and Lucy blinked. The body was . . . she leaned forward, wondering if this was an optical illusion, but it wasn’t. The body was shrinking, minute by minute. It was like the death scene of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz .
    The man had on thick mountain gear, so it was hard to tell at first, but the clothes flattened out, the head retracted like a turtle’s until it was no longer visible. Horribly, a boot fell off and rolled away from the leg, as if the foot had been chopped off.
    The film fast-forwarded through sunset, the shadows lengthening visibly in the speeded-up monitor, until the image turned black. But not before an evening wind gusted lightly, blowing gray powder away from the still form. Lucy suspected that gray powder was the remains of the body, like incinerated ash.
    “Your eyes aren’t deceiving you,” Uncle Edwin’s deep calm voice said. “Postmortem, there was a process of early liquefaction, then ultra-fast dessication. The powder you saw at the end was my operative.”
    A few lights came on, and Lucy could see grim faces around the room. It was a lot to take in.
    “We suspect a viral hemorrhagic fever disease. Detailed intel is in a flash drive that was on the person of my operative. We have a senior officer of the CDC here. Dr. Samuels, can you report your impressions on the basis of what we’ve just