Easing her hands under his shoulder, she rolled him away from the ground to inspect his face. A waste of time. The features were so swollen and livid with settled blood that she couldn’t see more than the faint impression of a mouth, nose, and eyes. More black dots, more striations. She let the body roll flat again, opened her briefcase, and removed several items from their inserts. With a pair of sharp forceps, she gripped the end of one of the black dots and teased out what looked like a splinter, which she immediately placed in a collection bag. A globule of amber pustulates bloomed from the tiny hole. She used a syringe to capture it and drained the knot dry.

She closed her briefcase and resumed her trek toward the main tent. The silhouette of the ticket agent in the booth welcomed her. A flash from a criminalist’s camera revealed the deformed head.

Lauren passed through the gate and parted a sea of investigators. Forensics teams pored over every available surface in search of evidence. One even walked through the area with a digital video recorder in an attempt to capture the entire scene as they had found it. And it was definitely a massive scene. Corpses were everywhere on the hay-littered dirt, crumpled on their chests as though they had died even as they ran. Small pink flags marked their passing. They were marked with a series of numbers from twelve through twenty-eight. All of their heads were similarly swollen, parting their hair with odd cowlicks. Men, women, children. Most wore jeans and flannel shirts. Some of the women wore cheap dresses and scuffed high heel shoes, as though a night at the circus passed for high society in this rural section of Georgia.

A Sheriff’s Deputy waved her through the flaps and closed them again behind her. There was no dialing down the smell this time. The stench hit her in the gut and again she tasted her Mongolian beef, which had been much better the first time. Fortunately, she had dabbed enough perfume under her blouse that a shift of her shoulders released a bouquet of jasmine and lilac that almost spared her from the smell of death. Almost.

She stood in the main aisle and absorbed everything around her. Stadium bleachers had been erected in nearly a complete circle around the inside of the massive tent. From her vantage point, she could only see the metal support structures and the undersides of the wooden slats to either side, but the gaps overhead between the seats were filled with lower legs and feet. None of them moved. Directly ahead was the main ring. A group of suit-clad agents had gathered in the center under the tightrope and trapezes. Bodies littered the ground all around them. The spotlights still shined down on the carnage. There were performers of all kinds: the ornately-garbed ringmaster, young women in sequined leotards, animal handlers in elaborate costumes, filthy carnies, and a colorful assortment of painted clowns. A lion, a tiger, and a parade of elephants. All lifeless on the dirt, scattered as though a tornado had blown through. It was a truly mortifying sight.

One of the agents saw her and tipped his chin. He broke away from the others, strode directly toward her, and offered his gloved hand.

“Special Agent Maxwell Cranston,” he said. “And you must be Dr. Allen from the CDC.”

Lauren nodded and inspected him over his mask. He had dark eyes and hair slicked back with so much gel it seemed to absorb the scarlet glow from the lights strung up in the rafters. An air of confidence surrounded him. Unfortunately, that air reeked of the hundreds of corpses packed into the tent.

He gestured toward the center ring and fell into step beside her.

“Have you had a chance to examine any of the remains yet?” he asked.

“We both know the cause of death, but as far as the presence of any sort of communicable pathogen, we’re going to have to wait for a lab analysis of whatever samples I procure.”

They walked out from between the bleachers and Lauren gasped at the scope of the slaughter. The stadium seats were nearly filled to capacity. There had to be easily four hundred people collapsed on the metal slopes. Tangled in the aisles. Lying on top of one another. Clumped in mounds. She saw parents who had tried to shield their children with their bodies, elderly couples who had been trampled in the momentary stampede, baby carriages and wheelchairs, still occupied. These people had seen death coming, but had been unable to move fast enough to escape. Agents and officers in their isolation gear threaded through the masses, taking pictures and gathering whatever evidence they could find.

“From what I’ve seen,” Lauren said, “there are no outward signs of contagion, viral or bacterial. It doesn’t look like there was even enough time for anything to pass between them. That doesn’t necessarily rule out an infectious agent, though. If there’s anything in the samples, we’ll find it.”

“Then that ought to make your job here pretty easy.”

He glanced over at her. His mask stretched over a smile. There was obviously something he wasn’t telling her.

Cranston led her past the congregation of suits, whose voices lowered when she neared, and to the center of the ring. She recognized the massive bucket-shaped platforms the elephants used to rise to their full height and the man with the whip who encouraged them to do so. The tough, leathery hide had protected the elephants from the worst of the assault, yet their skin still bubbled with what looked like gray boils.

“We know the cause of death was the sheer number of bee stings to the head and face,” Cranston said. “We just don’t understand why they attacked like they did, why their stings were so toxic, or where they came from.”

One of the elephants was in much worse shape than the others. A gaping wound framed its abdomen, fringed by tatters of gray hide, viscera spilled out all over the ground. The bowels were thoroughly destroyed, torn apart.

Lauren could only stare at the mess. This was why she was here. Suddenly, she realized that she wouldn’t be going home anytime soon.

“I can tell you where they came from.” She pointed at the mess of entrails. “They chewed their way out of their host. A better question would be…where are they now?”

II

“Bees living in an elephant’s guts?” Cranston scoffed. “I don’t buy that for a second.”

“The evidence is right here at your feet,” Lauren said. She knelt over the viscera, removed a long pair of blunt forceps from her case, and tugged at the frayed mesentery. “Look at the edges. These aren’t clean incisions, nor are they ragged tears. You see how they almost appear serrated? That was caused by mastication. Think about how many insects it must have taken to kill this many people so quickly. There had to be hundreds of thousands of them, maybe millions. They didn’t just swarm in here through the tent flaps. I may not be an expert on bees, but I can’t imagine them behaving like that. No. That many individuals? They had to be brought here in some sort of vessel. And I think that’s exactly what we’re looking at here.”

“Your theory doesn’t stand to reason. How in the world do you propose someone was able to make a two-ton pachyderm swallow millions of bees? How would they survive inside of it?”

“That’s my job to figure out.” She glanced up at Cranston. “Have you already photographed this elephant?”

“Yeah…why?”

Lauren removed a scalpel from her briefcase and slit open a length of the small bowel like she was gutting a snake. The inner mucosa was wrinkled and slimy, and dotted with brownish chyme. She sifted through the sludge until she found what she was looking for, pinched it with the forceps, and extricated it from the ileum.