The Genesis Plague (2010)

Hazo called back.
    Breathless, Shuster rolled on to his back. ‘I’m okay,’ he said, panting.
    Hazo looked towards the entry tunnel and saw that the glow of Ramirez’s light seemed to be growing stronger again - coming back towards the cave.

77
    Years had passed since Bryce Crawford last walked these tunnels, yet he still recognized every oddity and anomaly inside the mountain as if they were the birthmarks of a former lover. Even the familiar loamy smell invoked fond memories of the extensive time he’d been stationed here - like grandma’s turkey roasting in the oven on Thanksgiving Day.
    Once Frank Roselli had declared the installation ‘complete’ the previous spring, the single entrance to Operation Genesis’s self-sustaining breeding facility had been sealed. Every mechanical part of the gnotobiotic isolator cells that housed the rats had been designed for remote operation, thanks to technology borrowed heavily from NASA’s unmanned space stations. Similarly, the facility generated its own power from a state-of-the-art compact nuclear reactor capable of continuously churning out electricity for ten years before needing refuelling.
    Even replenishment of the feeding tanks was handled by a cleverly concealed pipeline to a dairy farm situated a kilometre to the west. The milky nutrient solution manufactured there was a potent brew infused with plague virions and gonadotropin hormone that stimulated the brood’s pituitary development (to promote aggressive behaviour).
    What they’d built inside this mountain was the most sophisticated installation of its kind. Such a pity that not long from now, not a trace of it would remain, Crawford thought.
    As he neared the cave, his apprehension intensified with the sounds of squealing.
    These are no ordinary rats, he thought.
    He remembered Roselli saying that the proper name for a brood of rats of was a ‘mischief’, and how the Chinese revered the rat for its cunning and intellect, so much so that it earned top rank as the first of the twelve years in the Sheng xiao zodiac cycle. But this genetically enhanced batch of vermin would add a whole new meaning to ‘Year of the Rat’, thought Crawford.
    In one year, the typical female black rat - sexually mature at three months - gestated every twenty-four days, gave live birth to twelve pups and spawned 16,000 offspring. But thanks to Roselli’s ingenious breeding technique, the birthing rate had been increased to an average of sixteen pups. Therefore, the growth algorithm for Operation Genesis conservatively assumed that each female in the initial set would account for an astounding 24,000 descendants in the first year alone. Naturally, the descendants would carry that trend forward exponentially.
    Much of the epidemiological detail was lost on Crawford. But he remembered Roselli referring to the rats as a natural ‘intermediate host’ for plague transmission. Stokes preferred to call them a ‘delivery system’. All Crawford knew was that once the brood had reached critical mass, they’d be released from the cave into the Zagros Mountains.
    Once unleashed on their new habitat, the rat population would spread out in all directions. And all the while, they’d rampantly breed; just like they’d been doing in this cave - just like their cousins, the Asian black rats or ‘ship rats’, had done before spreading out from China centuries earlier to transmit the Black Death throughout Europe.
    Highly intelligent survivalists by nature, the rats would evade capture by burrowing underground, hiding in the mountains’ nooks and crannies, and building hidden nests inside the walls of homes and buildings. Even if they were to be spotted out in the open, the rats were virtually impossible to catch, because for their body size they were among nature’s best athletes: able to sprint at nearly forty kilometers per hour, swim half a kilometre, climb vertically up walls and jump up to over a metre, even squeeze their rubbery bodies through a hole smaller than a quarter. Trapping them was no easy task either since their chisel-like teeth, with more crushing force than a crocodile, could gnaw through metal and wood. At the genetic level, rats were 90 per cent identical to humans - the reason they were favoured for clinical laboratory testing. But a rat’s most important physiological similarity was its brain - nearly identical to a human’s in its ability for spatial memorization.
    These rats will be impossible to