The last drop of daylight was draining from the western sky—a fading that seemed more a suffocation than a sunset, a final faint gasp as the day died of heat stroke. To the east, a dull copper moon, just on the downhill side of full, struggled above the ridgeline of the Great Smoky Mountains. From where I stood, in a ridgetop pasture above the confluence of the Holston and French Broad rivers—above the headwaters of the Tennessee, in other words—I had a ringside view of the demise of the day and the wavering birth of the night.
Just below the ridge, across the river on Dickinson's Island, the lights of the Island Home airport had winked on, etching the runway's perimeter in white and the taxiway in cobalt blue. The main landmarks of downtown Knoxville shimmered a few miles farther downstream—two tall office towers, a wedge-shaped Mayan-looking Marriott, the high bridges spanning the river, and the looming waterfront complex of Baptist Hospital. A mile beyond those, as the fish swims, lay the University of Tennessee campus and Neyland Stadium, where the UT Volunteers pack in a hundred thousand football fans every game, most of them clad in bright orange. Tucked beneath the stadium, along a curving corridor that echoes the stadium's ellipse, was UT's Anthropology Department. My Anthropology Department, the one I'd spent 25 years building from a small undergraduate major to one of the world's leading Ph.D. programs. A quarter-mile long and one room wide, Anthropology occupied the outer side of the stadium's dim, windowless second-floor hallway. Mercifully, the classrooms and labs and graduate-student offices did possess windows, though the view out those windows was a bizarre and grimy one, consisting mainly of girders and crossbraces—the framework supporting those hundred thousand orange-garbed, foot-stomping football fans in the bleachers, keeping them from crashing down amid the countless human bones shelved beneath them.
The most dangerous man of this century has employed the most dangerous weapon yet. Criminal mastermind Harlan DeVane has developed -- and spread -- a deadly, genetically engineered "superbug" resi...
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