Contagious (41 page)

disease
dead, all of it—crawlers, dandelion seeds, triangles and hatchlings. She wanted to kill every last bit of it, in as painful a way as possible. Watching those things break apart on the screen filled her soul with a dark satisfaction.
She wondered if this was what Perry felt when he killed an infected host.
“Hey Margaret,” Dan called. “Did you do something to the samples?”
“Yeah,” Margaret said without looking away from the sheer beauty of a dead crawler. “I gave them a nice latrunculin bath and killed them.”
“No, not that one,” Dan said. “I mean
all
of them.”
She stepped back and took in the whole screen. In all twenty-five side-by-side samples, nothing moved. They’d successfully killed many of the crawlers, but until a few seconds ago over half the boxes had still shown activity. Now, no movement at all.
“Gitsh,” Margaret said, “check this monitor. Is it frozen or something?”
Gitsh looked at the screen, then moved to the computer that fed the images. As he checked it, Margaret’s eyes slid over the twenty-five test pairs. Each had a word across the top. Words in red indicated no effect on the crawlers. Words in green showed successful kills.
Chlorine killed them, and in far lower concentrations than the Margo-Mobile’s decontamination mist. In fact, basic bleach killed them instantly.
That was great for sterilization but didn’t do much for a living victim. Antibiotics, unfortunately, had no effect, and Sanchez’s immune system completely ignored the things.
Reducing the temperature did nothing—freezing them might work, but that would also kill the host. Heat at two hundred degrees Fahrenheit or higher killed them, but that wasn’t a solution either, as those temperatures would also kill the host. Heat did, however, provide another way to decontaminate any area exposed to the dandelion-seed spores.
“The picture is live,” Gitsh said. To punctuate the point, he changed the screen from twenty-five small squares to one big square containing a nerve crawler. He slid a needle into the sample. Up on the screen, she saw the needle magnified thousands of times. It looked like a giant sword poking into a hydra.
“Huh,” Margaret said. “It’s like they just shut off.”
“They quit,” Dan said. “They have seen the new Mightily Pissed-Off Margaret, and they threw in the towel.”
Suddenly, Clarence’s voice crackled in her earpiece, anxious and rushed. “Margo! Murray found the satellite! They just launched an attack, and they think they got it.”
“Oh my,” Margaret said. So that’s why Murray had been in such a hurry.
“When? Like two minutes ago?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“The samples, they shut down,” Margaret said. “Even at the smallest level, they must have been controlled by the thing. Is there any effect on Sanchez?”
“He’s out cold,” Clarence said. “He was babbling incoherently, then started getting groggy and just dropped off. He’s snoring.”
Margaret didn’t know what to think. The crawlers’ sudden shutdown, Sanchez falling asleep, both things coinciding with the satellite’s destruction. Could it all be over?
No. It wasn’t all over. She knew that.
“Dan, how much latrunculin do we have?”
“Plenty, if it’s just Sanchez,” Dan said. “If we need more, the supplier could medevac it right to us.”
“Let’s see if it works first. Start an IV drip of latrunculin on Officer Sanchez. I’m not going to get caught with my pants down. These things might reactivate at any second.”
“But latrunculin is toxic as hell,” Dan said. “We give Sanchez too much, he could lose the ability to breath, his heart could stop. Shouldn’t we wait to see if these things are really dead?”
“No. We’ll watch Sanchez carefully, but get him on it right now.”
“But Margaret, he—”
“That’s a fucking
order,
Dan,” Margaret said. “Now start the goddamn drip.”
Dan looked at her for a second, then snapped a smart salute and walked out of the autopsy room.
Were his little feelings hurt? Margaret didn’t care. She finally had a potential weapon, and she was going to use it.

MOVEMENT
Margaret sat down at the computer desk, utterly relieved to finally be out of the hazmat suit she’d worn for fifteen hours straight. She typed commands to call up the new Sanchez samples.
What was that
smell
? Had someone left food in here? She looked under the desktop, then under the chair before she realized what it was.
The smell was
her.
Damn, she needed a shower something fierce. Nothing she could do about that now, though.
She looked at the readout. The latrunculin was working—Sanchez’s crawler counts had fallen. The chemical’s side effects were taking their toll, but he wasn’t in any serious danger. Not yet. She called up a feed from one of the latest samples. It showed three crawlers, still motionless, just as they had been since Murray’s people shot down the satellite. As she watched, one of the crawlers slowly dissolved into little bits, courtesy of the latrunculin.
The second crawler started to disintegrate. Margaret had never seen anything so beautiful in her entire life.
And then . . .
. . . then the last crawler twitched.
She stared, wondering if she’d imagined it, hoping she had. It twitched again, kept twitching. It reached out, looking for something to grab. A dendrite arm locked onto the surrounding muscle tissue and
pulled.
The crawler was crawling again.
The intercom buzzed.
“Margaret, you there?” Dan’s voice, urgent.
“I’m here.”
“Something’s up,” he said. “I’m looking at the side-by-side samples. Everything that wasn’t already dead is moving again. They just woke up,
all
of them.”
THE REBOOT
So many thoughts. So many voices. No organization. No
cohesion
. Did she know what that word meant? Yes, she did.
Chelsea blinked and opened her eyes. Slivers of early-morning light poured through cracks in the roof and the boarded-up windows. She felt sleepy. She felt sad.
Her special friend was gone.
She needed Chauncey’s wisdom, needed to know what God wanted her to do. She sensed the minds of the soldiers, the hatchlings, the converted. They were all very still. Random thoughts . . . they were dreaming. No one there to tie them all together.
That’s what Chauncey had provided. He’d made them
one
.
A sneaking suspicion grew in her mind. What if
she
could connect everyone? She could replace Chauncey.
He had been God, but he was gone.
Now
Chelsea
was God.
She sensed all the soldiers, Mommy, Mr. Burkle, the Postman, General Ogden . . . she sensed the two hatchlings back in Gaylord . . . and she sensed one more voice, a new voice, very faint, very
weak,
but also very close.
The two hatchlings in Gaylord remained prisoners.
Prisoners of the boogeyman.
Chauncey had told her to leave the boogeyman alone. Chauncey had
blocked
her, but Chauncey wasn’t around anymore.
And besides, no one could tell Chelsea what to do. She wasn’t afraid of the boogeyman. God shouldn’t be afraid of anyone.
Could she block the boogeyman, like Chauncey had done? Maybe, but it would take time to learn how, to experiment. If she couldn’t block him fast enough, the boogeyman would come for her.
Unless she got to him first.
She summoned General Ogden. It was time to put the pieces in place for his contingency plan, just in case the boogeyman escaped.
PERRY HEARS AGAIN
I’m going to kill you.
It started as a mental tickle, or maybe a ringing. Something faint. At first he wished it away. He just wanted to sleep.
You will scream . . . and scream . . .
The ringing grew louder. He heard a voice but couldn’t register it. What he
could
register was a serious hangover. Holy God, did his head hurt.
. . . and scream.
Perry sat up and tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. The movement produced a metallic sound. The bed felt wobbly. Both hands held his head as he looked around. He wasn’t in a bed. He was on an autopsy trolley in the examination room. Someone’s idea of humor? Well, yeah, that
was
kind of funny.
The mental tickle grew. With a sinking sensation, he recognized the feeling.
Chelsea.
Are you afraid?
She’d grown stronger. His breath came in short gasps. He
was
afraid.
I’m gonna get you, boogeyman. Maybe I’ll make you shoot yourself . . .
Fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuck.
Perry’s hand shot to his waist, to the holster. The .45 was there. His hand gripped the cool handle. He didn’t draw it, just held it.
Soon, boogeyman . . .
He hadn’t experienced her this clearly before. The intensity shocked him. It felt as if her every little emotion was the most important thing that could possibly happen. And yet behind the intensity lay a curious blankness, the feeling that she wasn’t good, or evil.
Chelsea didn’t know what good and evil were.
She would do whatever she wanted, without remorse, without conscience.
Soooooon . . .
Perry had to find her. Find her and help her.
He jumped off the trolley and ran to find Dew.
CRAVING MCDONALD’S
Private Alan Roark parked the Hummer on the shoulder of North Chrysler Drive. He hopped out. So did Private Peter Braat, who carried the map. They both walked to the back bumper and looked at the massive overpass.
“Fuck,” Peter said. “That’s a lot of road.”
Alan nodded. It was a lot of road.
To their right, three lanes of I-75 heading north, then just past it three more lanes heading south. Those six lanes slid under the overpass of another six-lane highway, this one M-102, also known as Eight Mile Road. The sound of tires whizzing over wet pavement combined with hundreds of passing engines to create an almost riverlike, tranquil babble.
“That’s a lot of lanes,” Peter said.
Alan nodded again. “Yep. Sure is.”
He turned and looked into the back of the Humvee. He’d already counted what was back there five times, but God was in the details, so he counted again.
“Seems like a long ways off for a perimeter,” Peter said. “We’re ten miles away from the gate. How are we gonna hold a perimeter ten miles out with just two fucking platoons, you know what I mean?”
“The general knows what he’s doing,” Alan said. “So does Chelsea. They’re bringing in the other two platoons from Gaylord, so we’ll have that. Besides, the bigger the area we control, the harder it is for them to find Chelsea.”
Peter nodded. “Makes sense, I guess. Still, I wish we got to do the airport thing.”
“Willis and Hunt got that one.”
“I know,” Peter said. “I hate those guys. We should have got that gig. Let’s just hope we make it back to watch the angels come through. That will be such a glorious moment.”
“Truly,” Alan said. “But if we don’t see it, I’m sure it’s all part of the plan.”
Peter nodded, slowly and solemnly. “Okay, so we’ve seen these roads. Where is our spot?”
Alan pointed up to Eight Mile. “We’ll just drive up there and get to work.”
“Easy peasy,” Peter said.
Alan nodded. “Easy peasy bo-beasy. Let’s go. We’ll just drive around and see if we get the call. You hungry?”
“I could go for some McDonald’s,” Peter said. “I have the biggest craving for it lately. That, and I can’t stop jonesing for ice cream on a stick.”
“You too? Man, that’s weird. I never liked ice cream before, but now I wanna fucking
bathe
in that shit. Let’s eat.”
They got back in the Hummer. Alan waited for traffic to clear, pulled onto the road and headed north, looking for the golden arches.
GO SOUTH, YOUNG MAN
Take some lumpy shit from horses, the smelly kind that’s peppered with half-digested hay. Mix that with gravel. The jagged kind. Now cover it all in kerosene and light it on fire.
That’s what it felt like inside Dew Phillips’s skull. He’d slept on the floor of the computer room, right after Baum and Milner convinced him it would be funny to put a passed-out Perry Dawsey on the autopsy trolley.
Well, that
was
kind of funny.
A headache like that and a hyperactive Perry Dawsey jabbering a mile a minute? A match made in hell.
“Perry, you gotta talk slower,” Dew said. “Seriously, my head.”
“Yeah, mine too,” Perry said.
“There’s a difference. You and Baum and Milner, you’re all young. I’m old enough to know what will happen if I drink that much, which means I’m old enough to know better.”
“You seemed to be down with it last night.”
Dew nodded and instantly regretted doing so. “Last night I was awash in the glory of victory. And now that it’s morning, my head feels like ass, and you’re telling me that victory was no victory at all?”
“She’s talking to me,” Perry said. “She says she’s gonna kill me.”
“Where is she?”
Perry shrugged. “South.”
“How far south?”
“I don’t know,” Perry said. “Could be Ohio, could be Indiana, fucking Kentucky for all I can nail it down.”
“So how do we find her?”
“Like before, I guess,” Perry said. “We start driving south till I feel it getting stronger, then we go in that direction. The signal is fucked up, though. I feel something
moving
south, something big, and something even stronger beyond that. We should start driving right now.”
Dew thought that over. It would work, it had before, but how long would it take?
“I don’t know if we have that much time,” he said. “Now that the jamming is gone, now that you feel something, you can focus on the hatchlings. Maybe we’ll find out exactly where this thing is.”
Perry thought for a second, then nodded. “It’s worth a shot.”
“So will you go in there and talk to them again?”
Perry took a deep breath, then let it out long and slow. “I don’t want to. She’s so
strong,
Dew. She might be stronger coming through the hatchlings, I really don’t know.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” Dew said. “Will you or will you not go talk to them again? I’ll be right there with you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Perry said.
Dew smiled. “We’ll do it just like the shooting range, okay? I’ll have a gun at your back. You get silly, I’ll put you out of your misery.”
Perry chewed his lip for a second. “Okay. I’ll do it. But Dew, you better not be lying about shooting me in the back. If I have to die, I have to die, but . . . I couldn’t handle it if I hurt you.”
Hard to believe this was the same kid who had butchered a family only eight days ago. But people couldn’t change that much in that short of a time. This version of Perry had always been there, waiting for a reason to come out.
Pride swelled in Dew’s chest—once again Perry Dawsey was going to stand face-to-face with his nightmare.
MOMMY IS A BIG BABY
Chelsea Jewell sat at the Winnebago’s back end, in the couch that faced the front. Her small body made the couch look like a giant throne. She had a little blood in her hair. A hatchling sat on her lap. She’d named it Fluffy. Chelsea slowly petted Fluffy, feeling the nice texture of his stiff, triangular body. Fluffy’s eyes stayed mostly closed, and when they opened, they opened only a little bit.
Chelsea wanted to stay calm, but General Ogden was making her so angry.
“Chelsea,” the general said, “we should just leave him alone.”
She said nothing. He stood there, waiting for her to speak. The plastic on the Winnebago’s floor was torn in places, kicked aside in others. Covered with tacky blood, it still crinkled under General Ogden’s feet. Little bloody tentacle tracks lined the walls and the burnt-orange fabric on the seats and couches.
I want the boogeyman dead.
“Can’t you block him? Like Chauncey did?”
I’m trying, but it’s hard. I don’t know how yet. He could come for me before I figure it out.
“The gate will be done in about three hours,” he said. “We don’t have to show our hand. Even with the rest of the men driving down from Gaylord, we have too few soldiers for a real fight.”
She just stared at him. What did he know, anyway? He was just the general. Chelsea was in charge. If she said they had enough soldiers, they had enough soldiers, and that was that.
What about the other soldiers back home? The ones you left to deal with Whiskey Company?
“That’s just eighteen men, Chelsea,” Ogden said. “They have to go up against a hundred twenty men and do enough damage to take Whiskey Company out of the picture.”
Well, if you have eighteen, then—
A voice called from outside the Winnebago, stopping Chelsea in midsentence.
The strange, deep new voice of Mommy.
“Chelsea! May I
please
talk to you?”
Mommy used her mouth, not her thoughts, which meant she was upset, confused.
Chelsea sighed. She would have to get up and walk outside. Mommy was already having trouble fitting through the Winnebago’s door. Chelsea lifted Fluffy and set him down on the couch.
“You
stay,
Fluffy. Stay!”
She didn’t have to speak out loud to Fluffy, but it was more fun. That’s how you talked to puppies, in the special voice so they knew you loved them.
Come with me, General.
Chelsea walked out of the Winnebago’s side door and into the building’s cold winter air. Ogden followed her. They both looked at Mommy.
Mommy seemed sad.
“Hello, Mommy.”
“Chelsea, honey,” Mommy said. “Something’s wrong. Wrong with me. Maybe with my crawlers?”
Chelsea shook her head. “No, Mommy. Nothing is wrong.”
Mommy started to cry a little. She was such a baby.
“But . . .
look
at me,” she said. “It hurts. I’m not pretty anymore. It hurts so
bad.
”
“Pain brings you closer to God, Mommy. Don’t you want to be closer to me?”
Mommy nodded. “Of course, but baby, just look at Mommy for a second. If this keeps going, Mommy is going to . . . to . . .”
“You’ll serve God, Mommy,” Chelsea said. “You’ll see, it will be so cool. Bye-bye now, Mommy. Bye-bye.”
Mommy turned, slowly, and walked away.
Chelsea turned to stare up at General Ogden. “You don’t know anything,” she said. “You’re just a general. I’m the boss of you. I
want
you to kill the boogeyman.
I want it!
”
“But Chelsea . . . most of our men are already on their way here.”
Then take some of the eighteen you left back home and send them to kill the boogeyman. And tell them to rescue my hatchlings, too—we can’t make those anymore.
“But Chelsea, that will leave only nine men for the sneak attack on Whiskey Company. That’s just not enough.”