Contagious (16 page)

UNKIE DONNY HAS HAD BETTER DAYS
Donald Jewell, or “Unkie Donny,” as Chelsea liked to call him, did not feel good. Perhaps it was more accurate to say that he felt like a tainted can of boiled elephant ass.
The fever had picked up steam. It came nicely packaged with an overall ache, as well as annoying shooting pains in his left arm. Far worse was that Betty seemed just as sick. She was slumped in the passenger seat, head against the window, eyes closed. And she was sweating.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Someone was
following
him.
He couldn’t be sure who it was; there were so many cars on the highway. But he’d seen cars behind him, the same cars, several times. Who was it? What did they want?
He’d been on the road for over two hours. He had at least six to go, more like eight or nine if the weather didn’t let up. Freezing rain made driving a royal bitch. All the traffic on I-75 moved along at forty-five miles an hour. At least up north, people knew how to drive in winter: it was a safe bet that the cars in the ditch belonged to downstaters or people from Ohio.
He was hot, he was sleepy, the conditions were crap—not a good combination when his whole life sat in the passenger seat next to him.
Who was following him?
Who?
Donald pulled off the highway into a rest stop near Bay City. He exited slowly, seeing which cars behind him did the same. None did. They must have known he was onto them.
Or maybe he was acting crazy. . . . No one was following him. That was just nuts.
He pulled up to the rest stop building and parked gently, so as not to wake his daughter. Cars packed the lot. Some were still running, tailpipes trailing exhaust, windshield wipers fighting the constant battle against icy clumps. Other drivers had thrown in the towel, shutting off the engines and letting the freezing rain cover their cars in a thin, bumpy sheet of ice.
Since he was here, maybe he could just get some sleep. He shouldn’t be driving when he felt like this. What if he fell asleep at the wheel?
He quietly opened the door and headed to the trunk, shoulders hunched against the frigid, driving rain. He stopped halfway, face scrunching in pain and head twitching to the left until his ear touched his shoulder. Another shooting pain, this one a real doozy. It faded slowly. By the time it was gone, Donald’s jacket was nearly soaked. He cursed his brother for making him sick, then opened the trunk and pulled out a sleeping bag.
Darting back into the car, he removed his wet coat before spreading half of the sleeping bag on his daughter. He spread the other half on himself, coughed, blew his nose, cursed his brother one more time, then laid his head against the headrest.
Just an hour or two, a quick nap while the storm blew over and the snowplows cleared the highways, and then they’d be back on the road.
Inside Donny’s body,
things were rapidly shifting from Fucking Bad to Even Fucking Worse.
The problem began with his telomeres. What is a telomere? Picture the little plastic bits on the end of your shoelaces. Imagine each time you tie your shoes, you have to clip off a little bit of that plastic part to get it to go through the lace holes. After you’ve done this enough times, the plastic tip is gone and the shoelace starts to unravel. Once the laces unravel enough, it’s impossible to tie your shoes, and you walk around looking like a goober.
Telomeres are the DNA equivalent of those plastic shoelace bits. When your cells divide via mitosis, the chromosomes of those cells also divide. One set of chromosomes divides to become two half-sets. Your body duplicates each half-set, and one cell becomes two daughter cells.
Simple enough, but there’s a catch.
When your chromosomes split, it’s like a zipper splitting into two parts. Enzymes flood the newly divided chromosome and fill in the missing zipper halves, one little zipper tooth at a time. Problem is, the zipper teeth can’t reach all the way to the end—there has to be a little cap there, and that cap is the last bit of the repetitive telomere. On the next cell division, that last bit of telomere is discarded just like the snipped bit of the plastic shoelace.
If cells with shortened telomeres continue to divide, bad stuff can happen. The cell might enter into apoptosis (the natural kind, not the triangle-induced chain-reaction kind). Worse, damage to a critical gene might make the cell cancerous. This can happen in skin cells, muscle cells, lung cells . . . and even stem cells.
When a stem cell splits into two daughter cells, it uses a process called
differentiation
to make one daughter cell another stem cell, while the other becomes any number of good things—muscle, bone, nerve cells, whatever. Stem cells are just funky that way. But as they divide, they suffer the same telomere reduction as any other cell.
As you get older and cells continue to divide, those telomeres shorten and problems become more likely. We have a simple word for this phenomenon:
aging.
Cells with telomeres that are too short stop dividing and stop replenishing themselves. This is why your skin gets thin when you age, because the cells stop replicating as effectively—they have used up their telomeres during your preceeding years of life.
Or to think of it in simpler terms, a copy of a copy of a copy can get pretty messed up.
Triangles used many stem cells to make their cellulose framework and become full-blown hatchlings. Sometimes old stem-cell lines produced bad shit: defective cells, even cancerous cells. When that happened, the reader-balls and herders and builders identified bad stem cells and simply removed them.
The stem cells producing crawler strands, on the other hand, worked as solo operatives. They were in a
hurry.
Herders focused on finding and converting more stem cells, not doing quality control.
Donald, being the oldest of the three infected Jewells, had more shortened telomeres than Betty, and far more than Chelsea. Most of his modified stem cells produced defective muscle strands. Some of these strands were dead on arrival, just floating bits. Others lived long enough to send and receive the “I am here” signal and join up with other strands. Still others made it to full crawler size and began their mission along the nerves, although this effort alone was usually enough to make them shut down after a little bit of distance.
And when they shut down, the rot began.
Slowly at first, a low-level exponential reaction. But as the number of dead strands grew, so did the level of rot-inducing chemicals.
Each modified muscle strand carried both the apoptosis catalyst and a strong counterchemical that blocked the catalyst. If there were more living strands than dead strands, the apoptosis couldn’t gain a foothold. But when there were more
dead
strands than
living
strands, that balance tipped the other way.
Throughout Donny’s body that balance was tipping fast. Tiny areas of cell death expanded and multiplied. Particularly in his left hand, the apoptosis compounded on itself and started to spiral out of control.
While he slept, Donny Jewell began to dissolve from the inside out.
THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK
Zero casualties. Well, one if you counted Private Domkus tripping on a branch and spraining his ankle, but other than that, nothing. So if it was his most successful hatchling encounter yet, why did Colonel Charlie Ogden feel so anxious?
Air transport had pulled all of Whiskey and X-Ray companies out of Marinesco and taken them back to Fort Bragg. North Carolina wasn’t exactly a central location for the missions, but it wasn’t that far, only a forty-five-minute flight to Detroit on a C-17 Globemaster transport jet.
Fort Bragg was a big base. Big enough to sequester an entire battalion for five weeks and counting. Aside from missions, the men hadn’t left the base or had any contact with people outside the unit save for CIA-screened letters, or CIA-monitored phone calls to immediate family only. Ogden was no exception—he hadn’t seen his wife in over a month. It sucked, but that was war.
Fort Bragg also housed the USASOC, the United States Army Special Operations Command. Unconventional warfare, special reconnaissance, antiterrorism—all kinds of aircraft, coming and going at all hours. No one asked where they went, no one asked why they went. That was life 24/7 for the USASOC, and it provided ideal cover for Project Tangram operations.
Throw in all the aircraft available at the adjacent Pope Air Force Base, including plenty of those C-17s, and you had a perfect mix—built-in secrecy, endless options for transport. The DOMREC came and went; no one wondered why.
Ogden sat alone in his quarters, performing his nightly ritual. It consisted of three things:
A letter to his wife.
The Bible.
The Little Blue Book.
He kept the letter short. He was tired and had to get some sleep.
I love you, I miss you terribly, I don’t know when I can come home, but I pray it will be soon
. The usual stuff, repetitive only because it was sincere and he had to express it to her every day. Fold, insert, but don’t seal—tomorrow some CIA shithead would read it and make sure he wasn’t writing home about the hatchlings.
The Bible was just the New Testament, actually. Most of the gold lettering on the faux-red-leather cover had flaked off. Half of the back cover had torn off somewhere in the Mideast. Just random damage, not sacrilege.
Every night he read passages from the New Testament, then moved on to the Little Blue Book. Sometimes he’d skim the Bible passages, skip around, read some sentences and not others, but he didn’t do that with the Little Blue Book. With that one he read every single word.
Every single name.
He opened it and started reading.
Lewis Aucoin, 22.
He never wrote down rank. Death was death. You didn’t get a better death because you had a better rank, right?
Parker Cichetti, 27.
He remembered Parker. Good guy. Could juggle.
Damon Gonzalez, 20.
He’d never met Damon. Not even once.
He continued down the list of names, giving each one a moment of remembrance, a flicker of light in the terrestrial world just in case the afterlife was dark and silent. Sometimes he wondered if the souls of the dead could experience heaven only when someone remembered their name. Once you were forgotten, you were truly gone forever. Guys like Einstein, Patton, Caesar . . . every day people read about them in history books, saw their names in movies and TV—they spent an eternity in heaven. Guys like Damon? Probably would wink out of existence shortly after Ogden himself passed on.
He didn’t know where he’d picked up that strange belief, but it was always at the back of his head, driving him, pushing him to greater and greater achievements. He had to make a name for himself. He’d never thought the name could be as grand as that of a Churchill or a Schwarzkopf, but now he knew better.
He’d been given a once-in-a-lifetime task, and if he succeeded, victory would land him in the history books forever.
Was God testing him with this task? That was definitely possible. God worked in mysterious ways, true, but twenty years in the military had shown Ogden more of man’s inhumanity to man than he cared to remember. Sometimes God just put the players on the field and let them have at it.
Before all this began, he thought he’d spend four or five more years at lieutenant colonel,
maybe
make colonel near the tail end of his career, then retire as such. He wasn’t that great at playing the political game. He knew tactics and strategy. He knew how to win battles and minimize casualties. That’s what the army
should
base promotion on, but it doesn’t always work that way.
How things had changed in the past five weeks. He was a full bird colonel. He talked directly with the Joint Chiefs, had their total confidence. He had a black budget, a blank check for resources, for transport, for air support.
A command like this should have gone to a more senior guy, but President Hutchins had been obsessed with secrecy, limiting those in the know. Ogden had simply drawn the lucky card for the first mission, and now he got to keep playing it.
He’d fulfill the mission to destroy any gate he found, and he’d do it while adding as few names to the Little Blue Book as possible. Thirty-seven names was enough, but he knew there would be more.
Many more.
He put the book and the Bible away, then lay down to get his usual four hours of sleep. At least he didn’t have to finish the night by writing condolence letters to mothers, fathers and wives. In the morning he’d start planning again, figuring out how to prepare for an enemy no one had ever fought, an enemy guaranteed to change tactics.
Whatever happened, Colonel Charlie Ogden would be ready.
GAYLORD GOES TO BED
The Jewell family won the honor of having the most infected, but they weren’t the only residents of Gaylord sleeping away fevers, exhaustion and paranoia.
Bobby and Chelsea Jewell were already in bed. Donald and Betty slept fitfully at a rest stop on I-75 outside of Bay City, Michigan.
Sam Collins was damn old, damn tired and, although he was convinced that someone would probably break in and kill him, he just locked all the doors and went to sleep in his bed.
Wallace Beckett wasn’t quite so brave. He couldn’t stop scratching at his cheek and lower neck. He hid in his pantry, blocked the door with a stepladder, then went to sleep right on the floor. His son, Beck (yes, the lad was saddled with the unfortunate name of Beck Beckett), was so hot he took off all his clothes and went to sleep naked in an empty bathtub. Nicole Beckett, wife of Wallace, mother of Beck, was off seeing her grandmother in Topinabee. Unfortunately for her, she’d be home the next morning.
Ryan Roznowski was also itchy as all get-out. He
hated
being itchy, a phobia carried over from the time he’d been a kid and gotten poison ivy on his ’nads. His mom had always told him to stop touching himself so much, but did he listen? That incident meant Ryan always stocked a healthy supply of calamine lotion. He doused his four itchy spots, then promptly hid behind the lumber pile in his garage and went to sleep.
Bernadette Smith suddenly had a sneaking suspicion her kids were talking about her behind her back. She sent her son and daughters to their rooms, told them not to come out or make a noise. If they did, they’d get the paddle again. Her husband, Shawn, argued with her about paddling the kids, but she told him to shut the fuck up or she wouldn’t let him go to bowling league. In fact, Shawn, why don’t you just go to the store and get me some tampons, and when you get back, don’t you