Extract from novel "The Final Crisis - Biochemical Nightmare"

He was in the innermost Zone Three laboratory at the Damghan BW research establishment 100 miles from Tehran, sheltered by the Alborz Mountains. It was about 3.00 pm on a Sunday afternoon. Nikolai had just checked the time.

He was about to use one of the gleaming steel centrifuges.

Without warning, the whole room began to shudder. The vibrations became violent. Nikolai fell awkwardly on the floor. The lights blacked out.

It was his worst fear – an earthquake of tremendous proportions. The floor appeared to rise and fall, gathering excessive momentum as the quake peaked. Instruments and laboratory equipments were crashing to the undulating floor everywhere. Suddenly all was still. There was complete silence.

The emergency lights came on. The air conditioning was not working. The temperature began to rise.

Sparks cackled in the adjacent thermostatic oven. Fire was a possibility.

There were flames. Toppled Bunsen burners. Evil looking shadows flickered in unison with the flames, on the laboratory ceiling and walls, as if a horde of hideous demons had been let loose to wreck further havoc and mayhem on the scene. . Incarnate monsters bent upon destruction. Lucifer’s disciples.

Further down the laboratory, liquid cultures began to leak from sinister looking flasks.

Fermenters, horrific giant purpose-built cauldrons used to incubate bacteria over several days, emitted smoky vapour trails, purveyors of death in this, the devil’s kitchen.

Nikolai gradually came to his senses. He could hear the screams of his trapped colleagues. The alarm sirens were sounding at an ever-increasing pitch.

He opened his eyes. To his horror, he was partly lying in a milky brown pool of liquid tularemia. It was the highest concentration possible. A few centimetres deep, the pool was widening to entrap more of his body. Shock set in.

Nikolai tried to scream. There was no sound. He gurgled. HE TRIED TO SCREAM AGAIN. To no avail – it was useless. Frozen in fear.

The growing pool of tularemia was reaching all parts of his body. He tried to sit up. He could not move, trapped under a dislodged milling machine. He was doomed. HE BLACKED OUT.

Seemingly awake in his dream, he glanced at his watch. He had been unconscious for several hours it seemed or was it days? There was no sense of time. The nightmare continued…

There was enough tularemia to wipe out the entire population of Iran.

Nikolai knew he was doomed.

He realized Mikhail Gorbachev’s restructuring program, Perestroika, which had placed the Biopreparat and Glavmikrobioprom departments, responsible for producing vaccines and medicine, under the new super-ministry, the Ministry of Medical and Microbiological Industries, would not help him now.

Weird, terribly weird he thought about this now. Insane perhaps.

Ghostly, faceless, white-coated medical students began to poke and prod his body, muttering incomprehensively amongst themselves. Sometimes they insanely laughed. Now they were SHOUTING. They even brought in cameras and took photos using huge flashlights. The excessively bright lights hurt his eyes.

Without warning, and effortlessly, they lifted his weightless body, and carried him to the operating theatre. There were no nurses, only interns. Surgical gloves were donned. A dozen scalpels gleamed. Incisions were about to be made. No anesthetist present.

He wryly recollected a lecture at Med School in Moscow. An unusual incident had been described. A patient undergoing an operation had woken up during surgery. The patient had died in shock. The cocktail of drugs administered by the anesthetist was imbalanced. The anesthetist had fled the country. Never to be heard of again!

The first scalpel opened his chest cavity. A hissing sound as his lungs collapsed. The pain was more than he could bear. Bright red blood spurted like miniature geysers. His blood. More bright lights dazzled Nikolai.

He was hallucinating.

The savage symptoms commenced. He passed out again. Temporarily in some relief.

He had inhaled and ingested enough of the severe infectious bacterial liquid culture to die several times over. His perforated, Level-A, chemical protective suit, ripped open in the fall, was allowing the bacteria to enter his body through the multiple abrasions and scratches on his exposed limbs.

A hundred cells, an amount smaller than a speck of dust, would have been enough to infect him through an imperceptible cut or scratch.

Millions, if not billions of cells had already entered his body.

He felt his body was swelling, getting bloated, about to float to the laboratory ceiling, or was it that the ceiling was coming down to him?

His body started to uncontrollably shake. He defecated. Urinated. He was overcome by sudden waves of nausea. He felt hot and cold. The fevers and chills were increasing dramatically. Flu-like symptoms – moving through his body quickly. His face was one moment burning with the fever, ashen the next. The uncontrollable convulsions racked his body.

He still could not budge. Well and truly trapped - only to await the end!

Nikolai had no antibiotics with which to treat himself. Unable to move, he couldn’t reach the emergency cupboard where supplies of vaccines and antibiotics were stored on-hand for laboratory workers.

He needed countless bottles of hydrogen peroxide with which to disinfect himself. To pour over all his body, to act as an external barrier to prevent further ingestion. Perhaps he could drag himself out of the laboratory. But he was well and truly trapped.

Originally trained as a doctor, now a bioweaponeer working with recipes for death, he knew tetracycline was usually effective. This time, however, he felt certain even the latest and newest antibiotics would not work against the new virulent strain of the tularemia bacteria recently developed in Damghan.

A high-impact, crash dose of tetracycline over ten days?

Not enough in the cupboard. He needed to be taken to the ICU at the isolation hospital. New drugs might save him..

No way he could reach the nearby disinfectant shower.

No help was available. His colleagues were dying around him.

The bacteria began to multiply. It slowly spread to his lymph nodes, and distant organs including his liver and spleen. The pain was unbearable. MORE PAIN. Yet he did not lose consciousness. Nikolai was too sick to move. His mind started wandering. He screamed incomprehensibly again knowing that death was imminent. HE SCREAMED, SCREAMED AND SCREAMED AGAIN. The lights in the laboratory began to fade, a blackness descended, he was slowly DYING…. It would be over soon

Vivid real-like images of his beloved wife Svetlana in the unbelievable luxury apartment on the northern outskirts of Damghan, his joyous children, Yevgeni and Igor getting ready to go to the special non-Muslim school early in the morning, chaotically distracted by their pet poodle, Galina, making them late for school.

“Daddy, why can’t I take Galina to school with me?”

He remembered Igor’s pleading eyes.

“Daddy, why not, WHY NOT, please let me”

Nikolai started to cry, only the tears would not come.

The insistent pleading grew louder, hurting his ears.

Igor’s eyes grew bigger, taking on the size of large saucers.

Nikolai felt he was falling into them, from a great height, as if he was plummeting into plunge pools at a fairground. Giddy, GIDDY, G I D D Y…

His early childhood. His mother Galya, preparing the frugal evening meal in the dingy two room flat in Volgograd. His father, Yury returning home late from the WWII re-construction building site where he was the lead carpenter.

His days at Moscow University. His graduation ceremony.

The memories flashed past. Gathering momentum. Faster. Dizzy. URGENCY. No control. Spinning. TOO FAST.

Then it was too late. All gone. No more.

Blackness descended.

He DIED very slowly and painfully.

His body would be heavily dosed with chloramine disinfectant and wrapped in plastic sheeting. His remains placed inside a steel box, welded shut, and fitted into a conventional wooden coffin.

This was the usual procedure.