The Poison Grove

What the data said seemed impossible. Doctor David Splendid looked through the reports over and over again, but it was an exercise in futility. All of the information, impossible as it was, was also plain as day. The residents of Carter Lakes lying in Miranda General Hospital were dying a slow and unavoidable death. Nothing in all of his years of medical training, nothing in his decades of practice, no medicine or surgical procedure could change it. The report in his hands read the same for the last uncounted time and Dr. Splendid could contain it no more, he began to weep.

Where was the poison coming from? The first day of spring he had awoken to the sound of his telephone, then answered to discover Cindy Parks, one of the graveyard shift nurses, nearly screaming and mostly incoherent on the other end of the line. From what Dr. Splendid could decipher out of her panicked tirade a number of families in Carter Lakes had awoken in the early morning hours to nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and convulsions so bad that the emergency switchboard was inundated with calls and the volunteer EMTs that worked way out in those parts had to call into Miranda General for assistance. By the time the local paramedics arrived at the first house three people were dead. By the end of that day the number had risen to ten. The hospital staff worked frantically to save whomever they could, but in the end no one the ambulances carried down from Carter lakes that day survived.

Identifying the poison hadn't taken more than a basic toxin screen, every last one of the victims had died from lethal exposure to coniine. When the police returned to the section of Carter Lakes that had been home to all of the victims, they were stunned to find every pet, every squirrel, and every wild animal they saw in a four-block area dead. Further tests would blame the same culprit. The alkaloid poison, found in high and very lethal amounts in the leaves and stalks of Hemlock, was not know to be an airborne risk anywhere, but water samples taken from wells that day came back pure and there seemed no conceivable

way every family and every animal in the south end of Carter Lakes could have ingested the volume of Hemlock necessary to produce the effects witnessed that day. The board of hospital directors reviewed the information collected by the staff and local law enforcement for hours after the last victim died that day and determined there was only one possible way coniine was exposed to so many people with such terrible results; weaponization.

An alert call placed by the Miranda General chief of medicine had Homeland Security and FBI converging on Miranda, Washington while police across the country looked everywhere for evidence of the transport or delivery of anything that could produce an aerosol cloud of coniine sufficient to kill ten people in a roughly one square mile area. Nothing was ever found. Two weeks into the investigation a frantic Nurse Parks once again awaked David Splendid from his early morning rest. More calls had come in to emergency services about people in Carter Lakes waking up to violent symptoms, and once again every paramedic in Jefferson County had been mobilized. The second incident was far worse than the first, sickening over half of the community and killing more than thirty. With two events causing such widespread deaths and no explanation the Washington State National Guard was mobilized and Carter Lakes was placed under quarantine.

After the quarantine the government spent four more weeks combing the hillsides with scientists from the CDC and Forrest Services looking for anything that might explain the coniine's lethal presence. Survey crews and remote sample gathering devices were strewn about the small community then up into the woods and clear-cuts looking for the deadly toxin, but when a month passed with no further detection of coniine the authorities determined the incidents to be isolated and allowed people to return to their homes.

Three days later more people died. This time the entire event was recorded by the hundreds of sensors and sample taking devices the investigators had placed on every corner and nearly every tree for miles in and around Carter Lakes. The early morning air, fresh with dew and anticipating the rising sun filled very rapidly with coniine as trees in the forests to the south of Carter Lakes released their pollen. The prevailing winds carried it all across the development and into the bodies of everyone it could reach before dissipating to a non-lethal level. Nearly every person and animal in Carter Lakes was sickened this time, and fifty more people lost their lives. All of the data collected that morning said that the pollinating trees in the surrounding forests downwind of Carter Lakes somehow released enormous volumes of coniine during their reproductive cycle, an occurrence which every scientific mind involved deemed impossible. Everyone was stumped, and once again Carter Lakes was quarantined, this time permanently.