Necessary Evil by David Dun Read Free Book Online

of the gunman.
    Kier, now some distance away, still knelt in the tail section with the binders. He showed not the slightest interest in the plane or the bodies.
    "Are you finding anything I should know about?" she shouted.
    "I'll tell you later."
    She made herself continue to the command center of the plane. Beyond a maze of more seats and debris, a partially crushed door had been completely pierced by a heavy object— maybe a person's head. The jagged hole was as big as a basketball. Through that door she would find the flight crew.
    She heard a buzzing sound and automatically ducked, squeezing her way between seats and bodies, trying to avoid looking into the sightless eyes of a grotesquely twisted head. Now the buzzing combined with a popping noise. Of course—electric wires were shorting. Her gut tightened as her nostrils caught the heavy smell of burned plastic. She saw no visible flame— yet.
    "Kier," she yelled. "Kier," she said more loudly. "Get out of here. Take what you can."
    She glanced behind her. He was already gone.
    Her hands started shaking. An adrenaline intensity overtook her body. There was something . . . a presence. The physical cold mingled with her chilled spirit as the plane made deathly creaks. Outside, the forest was passing into nature's own death: winter.
    As Jessie touched the cockpit door, she caught sight of something through the jagged hole: steam—delicate, ghostly puffs of vapor—each wisp so marginally visible she wondered if they really existed. It was someone's breath condensing.
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 3
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Good men kill when the only alternative is more killing.
     
    —Tilok proverb
     
     
     
    F or a moment he watched Jessie as she knelt over the corpse in the snow outside the fuselage. Then he turned back to the interior of the plane, intensely curious. A feeling crept over Kier unlike any he could recall. It was like being tied to the tracks with train sounds in the midst. There were many large fiberglass pods, tan in color, stored in racks in the aft portion of the cabin. Each pod was about eight feet long, two feet in diameter. Most were broken open, and those that had split had heavy mantles of ice, like refrigerators in need of defrosting. Kier supposed that subzero nitrogen gas or something similar had escaped the pods, leaving behind the icy residue.
    Spilling from the broken pods were broken DeWar flasks that looked like metal-clad thermoses. Some had obviously bounced around the cabin and had spilled their contents. Each flask bore an orange-and-black biohazard symbol. Squatting down, he looked inside one of the partially torn open flasks. A vertically suspended carriage with various levels and pie-shaped metal containers hung from the screw-on lid. Inside those metal containers were small, translucent vials, some filled with liquid, some with what looked like a gelatinous material Each vial was a half inch long and coded with a number and initials. Each had a screw cap, the top with male threads, the vial itself with female threads. Some of the vials were crushed
    "This is all lab stuff," he said half to himself. Jessie, seemingly intent on the body, made no response.
    The tiny placards on the scattered vials read variously: avcd-4, AVCD-4-II, MY-TB, TB-i, TB-2, TB-AV, HP-A, HP-B, HP-C, and a host of other labels. Given the number of pods, if they were all similarly packed, there must have been thousands of vials.
    Kier knew that "CD 4" was a name for a protein molecule on the outside of the white blood cells of humans and certain monkeys, but he did not know what "AV" might mean. He knew that '' My TB'' might stand for mycobacterium tuberculosis. HP-A, HP-B, HP-C were perhaps hepatitis A, B, and C. In fact, it seemed that most of the labels bore initials that were shorthand for an infectious disease. He recognized malaria, typhus, scarlet fever, the bubonic plague, leprosy, and many others. Still more vials, with labels like stage 5-mal mel,