Contagious (37 page)

The man’s expression didn’t change. He reached up with his left hand, grabbed Jamall’s gun and lifted it until the barrel pointed into the air. It wasn’t a fast move, but it wasn’t slow, either: just smooth. No hesitation. Jamall seemed to freeze for a second, almost in disbelief that someone could be so stupid as to fuck with him, and then he tried to pull the gun free.
It was only then that Rome saw the man’s other hand coming out from behind his back, coming out with that same speed, that same confident smoothness—and holding a gun.
The man put the barrel against Jamall’s stomach and pulled the trigger.
The sound was like a cap gun. It didn’t sound real. Jamall’s face twitched, more in surprise than in pain.
Smooth as before, the man raised his gun up under Jamall’s chin and pulled the trigger twice.
Then the man’s throat started spraying blood. At first Rome thought Jamall’s blood was spraying on the man, but Jamall wasn’t bleeding that much—he just wobbled for a second, then fell.
The fat man dropped the gun and put both hands to his throat. His expression didn’t change. The guy
still
looked bored, even as blood seeped between his fingers.
The man turned to face Rome.
Rome had fired his .38. That’s what had happened. Smoke curled from the stubby barrel. He hadn’t even known he’d fired, but he must have. He’d shot the man right in the throat.
The man blinked a few times, then knelt, one knee on the ground. He reached back with his hands and eased into a sitting position. Blood continued to pour out of his throat, some of it splattering on the white McDonald’s bags. The blood stained his collar and his shirt, dripping from his red beard.
“I wish,” the man said quietly, “I wish you could know the love.”
Then he lay down on his side and stopped moving.
The blood slowed to a soft pulsing.
Rome saw the man’s wallet in his back pocket. He looked at it for a second, then his common sense returned in a flash of panic. He’d just
killed
that man. Armed robbery, that made it murder one. He looked at Jamall. Jamall was dead.
Fuck!
Jamall? How could
Jamall
be dead?
There were no sirens. There wouldn’t be. No one called the cops around here for a few gunshots.
Rome’s heart hammered away. His breath came fast and deep. This was so fucked up.
He reached down and grabbed the man’s wallet. It was thick with cash. Rome put the wallet in his pocket. He looked up and down the street. Cops wouldn’t come, not unless someone drove along this street and saw two bodies on the ground. Cops would be out fast then, real fast. Rome looked at the waist-high fence. It was torn open just a few feet away.
Run, or cover it up?
He put his .38 in his pants, grabbed the fat man’s arm and dragged him to the fence. Dude must have weighed 250. Rome pulled the cut fence aside and ducked under the cross-post, dragging the man’s body through. He ducked back out under the fence, then saw the trail of blood on the snow.
Fuck
. Someone would see that as soon as the sun came up. Still, that gave him plenty of time.
But there was one body left.
Rome looked at his dead friend. He’d known Jamall since they’d both been ten years old. Rome had seen people die before, but not
his
friend.
He felt a tear slide down his left cheek.
“I’m sorry, man,” Rome said as he grabbed Jamall’s wrist and started to drag. “I promise I’ll look out for your moms. I hate to leave you here, but I gotta get out. I’d expect you to do the same, man, you
know
this.”
Jamall didn’t say anything. He just stared up at the sky as he slid along.
Rome dragged Jamall’s body under the fence. He didn’t put Jamall right next to the fat man, but rather about five feet away. He could do at least that much for his friend. Rome slipped under the fence one last time, grabbed both McDonald’s bags and hurled them over. Finally, he grabbed the guns and ran back to the car. He could ditch them in the river.
Less than five minutes after they’d first approached the man, Rome drove his car down the empty street.
LIKE LEGOS
Chelsea made Mommy and Mr. Burkle leave the Winnebago. She sat very still, very quiet, and focused all her attention on Mr. Jenkins.
She could sense his location. She could send Mommy to him . . . but it was too late.
Chelsea felt his life slip away.
Death.
She’d felt the deaths of Daddy, Mr. Beckett and Ryan Roznowski, but this was different. They were vessels, their only purpose to carry the dollies. Mr. Jenkins was like her. He was
converted;
they were
connected.
She took a deep breath and tried to deal with the amount of information flowing through her mind. It wasn’t easy. The infection had spread to many of General Ogden’s men. She constantly drew knowledge from them, searching their brains for new information.
Now she knew words that most seven-year-olds would probably never have heard, and definitely not understood.
Words like
collective organism.
Mr. Jenkins had been part of that collective.
Chauncey, what will happen to Mister Jenkins now?
He will decompose quickly, so that no one can study him and use him against us .
But what will happen to his . . . to his interface? To all the little parts of you inside of him?
They are designed to destroy themselves as his body shuts down .
But we can use them.
No, Chelsea, they must decompose . Do not go near him. Stay hidden.
Chelsea thought. She reached out with her mind, connected with the little things inside Mr. Jenkins’s body. Could she? Yes . . . yes, she could.
Chauncey, I can change them. I can put them in different orders, like Legos.
Chelsea, I command you to stop this.
Chelsea ignored Chauncey. She loved God, but maybe God up in Heaven didn’t know how things worked down here on Earth. She sent a strong signal to the bits and pieces inside Mr. Jenkins, a signal in the form of two images.
One image of Mr. Jenkins, fat cheeks smiling, as he looked when he was alive. He was to stay that way. They were not to make him decompose.
The other image was of her favorite flower.

ICE CREAM WITH A GOD
At 0315, General Charlie Ogden’s Humvee rolled up to a battered plywood wall in a formerly abandoned building on Atwater Street in Detroit, Michigan. The plywood wall moved aside, the Hummer rolled in, and the plywood wall was put back in place.
The other vehicles would arrive soon. Ogden had ordered them to split up, come at the building from different routes, arrive at different times. A convoy would have drawn too much attention, but one green Humvee here, another there . . . at this hour no one would give a shit. As long as his men were under cover by 0500, they’d be fine.
The Hummer rolled deeper into the large, decrepit old warehouse, solid tires crunching on debris of wood, glass, trash and broken masonry. Two vehicles over by the far wall—a white and brown Winnebago and a filthy Harley Night Rod Special.
Standing in front of the Winnebago, a little blond-haired angel.
The motion of dozens of knee-high hatchlings, scurrying about on black tentacle-legs.
And the most important thing of all.
Eight curving columns in two parallel lines—four on the right, four on the left. The parallel opposites leaned toward each other. When they were finished, they would form four beautiful arches. Fat hatchlings sat on top of the columns. Each hatchling grabbed the top of a column with its tentacle-legs, then squeezed out a foamy brown material that hardened almost instantly. Each squeeze seemed to grow the column by six inches, maybe as much as a foot. If it hadn’t been blasphemous to think of such a thing, Ogden might have said it looked like the hatchlings were building the arches with their own shit.
When the hatchlings finished excreting, they looked thinner, triangular sides sunken in. The newly skinny hatchlings scurried down, instantly replaced by other fat ones. The skinny ones ran to piles of wood or to trash or to half-eaten, bloody corpses. They lowered themselves onto these things. Sharp, cutting parts slid out of their triangular bases and they started eating, pulling material up inside themselves with frightening speed.
The gate: never had the world seen something as perfect, as beautiful.
The sound of small feet crunching on broken glass drew Ogden’s attention away from the hatchling flurry. It was the little angel, her blond curls bouncing with each step. She held an ice cream bar in each hand.
“Hello, General Ogden,” the girl said. “I’m Chelsea.”
He knew this, because hers was the voice he’d heard in his head when he converted, when he’d been planning, driving. Just looking at her filled his heart with love.
We’ve been waiting for you.
She spoke right into his mind, spoke with that voice of love and wisdom.
“Hello, Chelsea. I like your motorcycle.”
Then it’s yours. Mister Korves doesn’t need it anymore.
She was love incarnate. She was everything.
We’ve been waiting for our protectors, General. Are you ready to protect us?
She handed him an ice cream bar.
“Yes, Chelsea,” Ogden said. “I’m ready.”
COPS
, STARRING SANCHEZ AND RIDDER
Officer Carmen Sanchez had a bad feeling about this one. A report of bloody snow and two bodies. He felt grateful for the subzero temperature. Morbid, sure, but dealing with a frozen body was preferable to finding one that had cooked in Detroit’s summer humidity for a few days. Sometimes these calls were crap, but after ten years on the force you got a hunch for which ones were the real deal. Sanchez had that hunch now.
The cruiser’s bubble lights flashed as his partner, Marcellus Ridder, pulled off to the side of Orleans Street. Headlights illuminated chewed-up snow.
Snow streaked with frozen red. Streaks that led toward a fence and the trees beyond. And just past the torn fence, two bodies—one black, one white.
Neither of them moving.
Ridder put the cruiser in park and grabbed the radio handset. “This is Adam-Twelve, responding to reports of bodies on Orleans Street,” he said. “We have two men down. Send ambulance and backup immediately. We’re examining the scene.”
A ten-year-old boy had seen the bloody snow, found the bodies, then walked to a gas station and called the police. What a ten-year-old boy was doing up at four in the morning, Sanchez didn’t want to know. Strict parenting didn’t always happen in these parts.
Ridder put the handset back in its cradle. They both got out of the car, guns drawn and pointed at the ground. Ridder knelt behind the cruiser’s open driver’s-side door, while Sanchez did the same with the passenger door.
“Police! Do not move!” Sanchez screamed in his loudest cop voice. “Stay where you are! If you can hear me, kick your right foot!”
Their caution probably seemed silly to most people, because both men looked very,
very
dead, but this much blood meant weapons, probably guns, and Detroit police do
not
fuck around with something like that. Either one of the men might rise up at any second and start shooting.
“I said move your right foot!” Sanchez screamed. That’s the way it usually went—Ridder did the driving, Sanchez did the yelling. To each his own special skills.
“We gotta check them out,” Sanchez said. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Ridder said.
“I’ll take the white guy on the left. Go!”
Sanchez scooted around his door and moved toward the prone white man. He kept his gun pointed at the ground but angled forward, so he would only have to raise it a couple of inches should the man pop up with a weapon.
The Caucasian corpse was overweight, with a frost-lined red beard and brown eyes that stared blankly into nothing. The eyes had frozen open. A small bloody hole dotted the right side of his throat. His shirt, especially the collar, looked stiff with frozen blood.
Still-wrapped Big Macs littered the area.
Ridder knelt next to the black guy.
“This guy’s dead,” Ridder said. “No pulse, cold to the touch.”
Sanchez reached down to feel for a pulse, fingers probing under the beard, feeling the fat man’s neck. The skin was cold and firm, but not stiff—the man hadn’t frozen solid yet. Sanchez felt the jawline, reached under it and pressed.
Then a sound like a soft cough.
The sensation that his fingers had popped something, a small bubble.
A thin cloud of gray lifted up and away from the man’s beard.
Only then did Sanchez see it—little blisters on the corpse’s neck, hands, even some on the forehead. He’d popped one, and this gray powder shot out and drifted through the air like fine pollen.
“Aw,
fuck,
” he said. “What the fuck is this?”
He backed away from the corpse, left arm bent, left hand held away from his body. He flung his hand, snapping his fingers outward. The powdery substance flew from his skin and floated in the air.
Ridder looked at him. “What the fuck happened, Chez?”
“This guy has blisters,” Sanchez said. “I think I touched one. It popped like a puffball or something. Fucking
gross
!”
He holstered his pistol “Get the first-aid kit. Oh man, this is so fucking nasty. Fucking asshole probably has AIDS or something. It’s a fucking AIDS blister. I should have been wearing gloves.”
Ridder ran to the cruiser and opened the trunk. He pulled out the first-aid kit.
Sanchez stopped and looked at the hand for a second, wondering if he actually felt what he thought he was feeling. He was. It wasn’t his imagination, his hand felt hot.
Real
hot.
“AIDS doesn’t have blisters,” Ridder said as he took a clear plastic alcohol bottle out of the kit.
“Yeah? Then why does this fucking
burn
? Hurry up!”
Ridder doused the hand with alcohol, then handed Sanchez some gauze.
“Wipe it off,” Ridder said.
“Oh, ya fucking think?” Sanchez wiped at the hand.
Ridder opened a belt pocket and pulled out surgical gloves.
Sanchez looked at the gloves in Ridder’s hand as he continued to wipe his skin. “That’s not going to fucking help me now, you asshole.”
Ridder took a step back. “Well,
I
don’t want AIDS.”
“You said AIDS doesn’t have blisters!”
“I don’t fucking
know,
okay?”
The burning sensation grew. Sanchez had vacationed in Jamaica once, with his second wife, and while swimming had put his left hand through a jellyfish. That’s what this felt like, a persistent stinging/burning pain that steadily increased.
“Oh man,” Sanchez said. “That was so goddamn sick. Shit, this
burns.”
Ridder stared at the hand. “Uh, Chez,” he said. “Remember this morning’s
Ridder stared at the hand. “Uh, Chez,” he said. “Remember this morning’s briefing? About that shit in Gaylord?”
Sanchez stopped wiping. His eyes widened in fear.
“Flesh-eating shit? You think I got that flesh-eating shit?”
“I don’t know, man,” Ridder said. “Just relax.”
“
You
fucking relax!”
“Look,” Ridder said. “We’ve got that test kit, that swab thing. Go use it on that guy.”
“Me? I think I’m fucked up enough here.”
“Well, if he’s got it, then you already got it,” Ridder said. “Why the fuck should
I
get it?”
Flesh-eating disease . . . was that supposed to burn? If not, what
did
burn? This came out of a dead man’s skin, for God’s sake.
“Dude, this
hurts,
” Sanchez said. “You’ve got gloves on, just check him!”
“No fucking way. Let the paramedics do it, they’re trained for that stuff.”
Sanchez could already hear the sirens. The ambulance would be here within minutes, but he couldn’t wait. He had to know now. “Come on, man,” he said. “Just do the test.”
He took a step toward Ridder. In the blink of an eye, Ridder was backpedaling, drawing his weapon and pointing it at Sanchez.
“You stay the fuck away from me,” Ridder said. “Stay right there!”
Sanchez did just that. His own partner, drawing down on him. This was messed up. This was how people got shot. “Okay,” he said. “I’m not moving. Just relax, Ridder, and stop pointing that gun at me.”
Ridder didn’t stop, not until the ambulance arrived and the paramedics took over.
PUTTIN’ ON HER WALKIN’ SHOES . . .
Margaret and Dew sat in the computer room, watching the flat-panel screens.
Note to self,
Dew thought.
Never let the sentence “How can it get worse?” enter your mind again.
Murray had just sent the live feed from Detroit’s Channel 7 News Eye in the Sky. The screen showed a road that ran parallel to a strip of snow-covered trees. Looked like an abandoned railroad track that had long since grown in. Near an area where the old track ran under an overpass, Dew saw a pair of unmarked blue semi trailers.
Another MargoMobile. Parked in the open. In a major city. Shit on a saltine wouldn’t have tasted this bad.
The caption at the bottom of the screen said, POSSIBLE CASE OF FLESHEATING DISEASE IN DETROIT.
Dew put Murray on speakerphone.
“Okay, Murray,” Dew said, “we’ve got the picture. What’s going on?”
“Be quiet and listen up,” Murray said. “I’ve got something else going on over here, something big, so I don’t have much time. We have a positive cellulose test in Detroit, but it is not—I repeat,
not
—a triangle infection. This might be similar to the Donald and Betty Jewell case. No ID on the man, fingerprints came up negative. Right now he’s a John Doe. As you can see, the story has already leaked, so we’re in damage-control mode. I’m sending a chopper for Margaret and her team.”
“But I can’t leave now,” Margaret said. “We
killed
that woman to get hatchlings, and now we’ve got them.”
“I don’t have time for your opinion,” Murray said. “Just listen. The man didn’t die from the disease. He was shot in the throat sometime last night. He has not—I repeat, has
not
—decomposed. The cop who found the body was checking for a pulse when some kind of blister popped. Paramedics didn’t go near the body, but they tested the cop a few hours later, and
he
was positive.”
“It’s contagious,” Margaret said quietly. “It finally happened.”
“That’s why I need you there ASAP,” Murray said. “The math is simple. We have triangle hosts killing people in Gaylord, so Ogden stays. Dawsey is the only one who can talk to the captive hatchlings, and since I’m not about to move those things across the state
or
let Dawsey out of Dew’s sight, they both stay. This Detroit case doesn’t have a triangle infection that we know of. No triangles means no gate, so we need to evaluate before we take any drastic action.”
“I agree,” Dew said.
“I didn’t ask for your opinion, either,” Murray said. “Margaret, it will attract too much attention to drop you right on the site, so we’re landing you at Henry Ford Hospital a few miles away. You’ll drive in. The Margo-Mobile crew already has the John Doe and the cop loaded in. They will move the rigs someplace secure.”
“You can’t move them,” she said. “At least not far. We need to check the area, see if the contagion vector is still there.”
“Margaret,” Murray said, “you’re looking at feed from a
news helicopter.
We have to get the trailers out of sight.”
“Then move them someplace close,” Margaret said. “If there’s one case, others could be in the same area.”
“Fine,” Murray said. “I’ll get someone on it. Dew, get Dawsey to talk to those hatchlings again. I don’t care what it takes. Cut off his finger if you have to. I need to address something else, so neither of you call me unless you have actionable information.”
Murray hung up.
“Wow,” Margaret said. “I’ve never heard him like that before.”
“I have,” Dew said. “It means he’s been up all night working on something big. What you just heard was the normally calm, cool and collected Murray Longworth stressed out to the max.”
The computer room door opened, and Otto rushed inside. “Margaret, there’s a chopper coming in. Pilot radioed down, says he’s here to take us to Detroit. He’s landing now.”
“Get Gitsh and Marcus,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Otto vanished.
Margaret turned to Dew. Her eyes burned with anger, intensity.
“If this thing is really contagious,” she said, “we’re in a whole different world of shit. The country needs to know. The
world
needs to know.”
Christ on a crutch. As if Dew didn’t have enough problems. The New & Improved Margaret Montoya wanted to go public. Trouble was, if it actually
was
contagious, she was 100 percent right. Murray’s skulduggery had its place, but the time for that was almost up.
“Examine it first,” Dew said. “Before you do something silly, can you give it twenty-four hours?”